by Andrew Miller ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 26, 2016
A forthcoming but ultimately disappointing tale of a writer’s path to mental health.
A memoir that recounts a life of chemical dependency and emotional tumult.
Miller’s (You Must Know This, 2016, etc.) second book is an unflinching confessional that candidly discusses his wrenching personal trials. Essentially an assemblage of essays, it eschews a linear chronology for something more peripatetic; the author freely roams from subject to subject, often slipping into a highly stylized, almost poetic discursiveness. Miller delves into such topics as his fraught relationship with an authoritarian father, his struggles with alcohol and drug abuse, his monthlong stint in a county jail, and his antipathy for religion. Along the way, he generously peppers his anecdotes with diverse literary references to authors such as Karl Marx, Julio Cortázar, Walt Whitman, and Dave Eggers. These are rarely plumbed deeply, however, so they remain merely references rather than points of illustrative intellectual departure. Miller is at his best when mixing unabashed candor with analytical self-scrutiny; for example, his discussion of his history of erotic adventurism with emotionally wounded women is both fascinating and unsettling. Also, Miller’s treatment of fatherhood, and of his newest relationship after two failed marriages, flirts with a theory of redemption. However, he often stops well short of analysis in favor of undisciplined venting: “I fucking hate the whole system of authority we humans have put in place. And by we, what I mean is white-European-males. The particular group of assholes to which I belong; though I wish I didn’t.” The prose is often gratuitously fractured, as if meant to parallel the author’s rage-filled disorientation. However, this device is neither new nor very artfully executed. The opening chapter contains a thoughtful, if derivative, reflection on the relationship between autobiography and shame. Indeed, Miller is to be commended for the courage with which he willingly exposes his life in order to capture some sliver of truth. However, this in itself won’t likely satisfy readers looking for something of greater substance.
A forthcoming but ultimately disappointing tale of a writer’s path to mental health.Pub Date: June 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-937865-70-2
Page Count: 186
Publisher: Civil Coping Mechanisms
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972
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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