A study of grief and empowerment sure to be useful to widows seeking an empathetic guide.
In this slim volume—part memoir, part self-help book—a widow navigates her way through the stages of grief.
Debut author Gould, a psychologist, is accustomed to helping her clients deal with bereavement and loss, but she was blindsided by her own husband’s sudden death in 1999. She turned to journaling to express and relieve her pain and eventually realized that her insights could help serve as a guide for other women coping with loss. The project took 10 years to manifest into eight chapters of memoirs, diary entries, occasional poetry and gently couched lessons—an emotionally charged account of one woman’s journey through personal tragedy. Although readers may sometimes find the author’s account of heartbreak fatiguing, her spiritual and psychological inquiries provide an uplifting balance. She delves into the process of grief, and also into the traps that many women fall into when they marry: dependence on a husband for an identity and happiness, and an ignorance of legal matters. Gould’s perceptive prose reflects her talent for lyricism (“I am furrowed and softened: a place of fertility for seeds to grow, and I am the farmer offering fields for grazing and growth.”). Each chapter ends with a suggestion (“Dear Reader”) that encourages the reader to follow her own path through grief, to create daily outlets for expression and allow a new self to emerge. The author lets readers experience her bright and dark days as she shows how the grieving process can be an emotional roller coaster before one attains a state of grace.
A study of grief and empowerment sure to be useful to widows seeking an empathetic guide.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0615636269
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Lucid Learning Systems, Inc.
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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