An uneven but often powerful indictment of a youthful subculture of violence and intimidation that darkens many lives.
A man struggles to overcome psychological damage from schoolyard bullying in this sometimes-harrowing, sometimes-feckless memoir of trauma and recovery.
Eisenberg, founder of the website Bullying Stories (bullyinglte.wordpress.com), recounts his ordeal from the second to seventh grades at his school in Lexington, Massachusetts, where he suffered regular beatings at the hands of several bullies and their gangs, who would surround, pummel, and kick him as he curled into a ball. Almost as bad as these attacks were the betrayal by friends who suddenly turned on him and joined the bullies and the callousness of adults who did little to help. He was sent to the school psychologist, but his tormentors were almost never called to account. The author’s recollection of these years is vivid and gripping, and it evokes primal scenes of terror that will resonate with many victims. (Although the bullies seem to have backed off as soon as he fought back.) The memoir loses its focus in his adolescent and adult years, though. He asserts a lingering effect of “Complex Post-traumatic Stress Disorder” from the bullying, marked by low self-esteem, negative self-talk, and aversion to ordinary conflict, but the resulting dysfunctions—teenage angst, social awkwardness, and an intense desire to fit in, having sex with any girl who took an interest in him, with ensuing relationship turmoil—seem more like run-of-the-mill growing pains that resolved themselves in a successful career and good marriage. The book’s final section recalls a middle-aged bout of major depression, which he overcame with a full-court press of antidepressants, talk therapy, yoga, health food, a meditation app, and a deepening involvement with the anti-bullying movement, including a cathartic reconciliation with his main bully. Eisenberg’s meandering ruminations on his psyche—“I was totally co-dependent on others”—sometimes drag, and his attempts to blame all his discontent on his bullying nightmare don’t always feel compelling. Still, when Eisenberg sticks to the unquestionable pain of his real victimization, he adds a moving, informed voice to anti-bullying efforts.
An uneven but often powerful indictment of a youthful subculture of violence and intimidation that darkens many lives.Pub Date: July 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5142-3818-9
Page Count: 202
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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