Smart and strikingly veracious.
A relentless, cautionary chronicle of smoking dependency.
In this affecting, journal-inspired memoir of cyclical compulsion, Pennsylvania author Beard describes a torturous lifelong waltz with the cold clutches of nicotine addiction. It started early, after her older sister, Tracy, was caught by her mother with a pack of cigarettes in her coat pocket. To appear “cool like everyone else,” Beard took up smoking at age 12, unaware that the habit would haunt her well into adulthood, beginning with collapsing lungs in her early 20s and progressing to agonizing episodes of hypochondria, depression and mood swings. The author’s fiance supported her many attempts to quit, offering nicotine gum and kind words, while her co-workers at a chocolate manufacturing plant were smug and cruel, waving their cigarette packs in the air as she passed. Beard writes with heartfelt honesty about continually wrestling with medicinal patches, doctors and her own cravings, which, at times, consumed her. In this slim memoir, she compresses a great amount of angst-ridden urges, fortitude and determination; using smoking-related historical and medical factoids, she dutifully reminds readers of nicotine’s immensely addictive and physically deteriorative qualities. Her riveting daily struggle to quit evolves through episodes of guilt, shame, success and failure in an internally combustive standoff between “knowing that I needed to quit and an addiction to the pernicious drug that kept me enslaved.” Beard’s all-too-common story will resonate with readers willing and interested in quitting cigarettes, and her fresh, unfettered perspective offers both hope and solidarity. Her cleareyed precision and stark honesty mine the heart and soul of her vulnerability and the natures of human desire, routine and self-control. She firmly resolves to remain an “endurance quitter” who recognizes that the struggle calls for committed, daily baby steps and nearly superhuman willpower.
Smart and strikingly veracious.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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 Yorkerstaff 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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