An ultimately affirming, albeit overwrought, story of recovery.
Gill, a former “disciple” of alcohol and “fanatical atheist,” gives readers a guided tour through his visions of hell in this harrowing true survivor story.
An exceedingly dark ride, as befitting its subject, this densely written “confession” immerses readers in Gill’s “psychic turbulence” and descent into alcohol and drug abuse. He was born to a European mother and Pakistani father and had “a red-haired veteran of the Vietnam War for a stepfather.” A vividly rendered dream (about demons that “clung to the tower’s walls like enraged and monstrous bats”), which opens the book, is prelude to the escalating debauchery of Gill’s early life. He started drinking at 16; by 22, he stopped “trying to maintain appearances...trying to function normally...trying to participate in the human race.” He writes, “I simply gave up—on life, on myself, on everything.” He painstakingly recounts a bender fueled by cocaine and crystal meth, and a vision of Jesus Christ keeping the demons at bay does little to curb his self-destructive impulses. Gill does eventually find love and emerges on “the other side of a living death.” The author takes opportunities at various points to make amends with some that he wronged, including a woman to whom he drunkenly exposed himself. “Whoever you are,” he writes, “I am deeply sorry. I was a very lost, very disturbed kid.” Considering the extent of his substance abuse, one can’t help but wonder how he could recount his life in such detail, an issue he addresses directly: “the inevitability of subjective distortion forces me to admit that this narrative is bound to contain errors.” Some may balk at the marathon paragraphs, florid passages, italic typeface, and copious Bible citations. Devout readers, however, may be more willing to forgive a saved Gill’s trespasses both in life and on the page.
An ultimately affirming, albeit overwrought, story of recovery.Pub Date: May 13, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 299
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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