by Julie Barton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 10, 2015
A heartfelt page-turner about depression and how dogs can save us from ourselves.
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In this moving debut autobiography, a chronically depressed short story writer tells how her relationship with her dog saved her life.
Barton was a successful associate editor for an unnamed book publisher in New York City and appeared on her way to further success, but catastrophic depression continually gnawed at her. One morning, she found herself lying disoriented on the floor of her barren Manhattan apartment, the room full of smoke because she’d collapsed while at the stove while cooking the night before. With disturbing clarity, the author lays bare in the starkest terms the ravages of deep depression, including the continual destructive self-talk that consistently undermined her. “You’re so stupid,” Barton berated herself on that fateful morning; she eventually crawled across the floor to call her mother and tell her that she thought she’d had a nervous breakdown. What seeds in the author’s life grew such poisoned fruit? Barton writes that her brother often physically and verbally abused her and undermined her parents’ attempts to deal with sibling rivalry. The author unmasks the hidden face of domestic violence, writing that her brother once pushed her so hard that she ended up cracking her head, lying unconscious in a pool of her own blood: “I woke disoriented,” Barton writes, “my father hovering over me, yelling, panicked.” This difficult subject matter might cause a lesser writer to overreach and fall into maudlin sentimentality, but Barton writes with simple clarity and precision about her depression and its effects on her life, and about her bad choices in relationships with men. Her relentless drive toward self-destruction was eventually healed by her crucial, life-changing relationship with her dog, Bunker. Through the memoir, the author shows a captivating ability to observe the interplay of external events and her inner life. Along the way, she discovers, through Bunker’s unconditional love, her own capacity for self-realization. When a medical issue threatens to cripple or even kill Bunker, readers will wonder whether the dog—and Barton herself—will survive.
A heartfelt page-turner about depression and how dogs can save us from ourselves.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9863607-8-7
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Think Piece Publishing, LLC
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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PROFILES
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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