by Alan Eisenberg ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 26, 2015
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
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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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