Scattershot.
Debut memoir about art forgery, Lithium, Bloomingdale’s, and electroshock therapy, among other things.
Behrman was born in 1962 and raised in an upper-middle-class New Jersey suburb. He noticed early signs of psychological instability in himself and made some preliminary attempts to get help. After graduating from college in the early 1980s, he settled in Manhattan and tried his hand at various jobs, from independent film producer to men’s-wear flack to p.r. rep. Off-hours, he wandered the Times Square area, indulging in hard drugs and hardcore sex of all kinds. In 1988, he was hired as a publicist by the artist Mark Kostabi, whose MO was a variant on the notion of name-brand apparel: Kostabi’s paintings were produced by minimally paid lackeys; he then signed each work as his own and sold it at a high price. Behrman helped pull together Kostabi’s production and publicity, then became involved in a forgery scheme within the company. Kostabi eventually found him out, and criminal prosecution ensued. Behrman was sentenced to a five-month term in a community corrections center with work-release restrictions. Meanwhile, he continued to fight his psychological compulsions—one of his many doctors diagnosed bipolar personality disorder—making numerous attempts to find the right balance of psychiatry and medication. (He was one of the original Prozac prescribees.) Out on probation, he had a manic episode that resulted in several months of electroconvulsive therapy; his battle with mania continues to this day. The first half of this reads like Brighter Lights, Bigger City without a dash of insight. Even more disappointingly, Behrman has no enlightenment to offer on the subject of manic disorders. The section on the Kostabi forgery case, however, is fascinating and worthwhile.
Scattershot.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50358-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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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