An often engaging portrait of damage and healing that will be invaluable to sufferers of PTSD and those who love them.
A novel that addresses the nature and effects of post-traumatic stress disorder.
DeLevie’s intelligent, cumulatively powerful debut novel involves eight men in a room, all veterans of the Israeli armed forces. They’re all suffering from some permutation of PTSD, and each is coming to group therapy in a desperate attempt to regain control of his life. Overseeing and facilitating the meeting is 71-year-old Zev, a warm, caring psychologist. He takes his task very seriously, drawing out these men’s psychological poisons. The men are from a variety of fairly normal backgrounds, and their lives have all come to a shattering full-stop due to the horrors of war. As they begin to tell their stories, it becomes clear that although the traumas are different for each of them (“For me, it’s not the sight of blood or hearing the screams of the wounded; for me it’s the helicopters and the booms of artillery”), the chilling, alarming effects are very similar. They can’t bring themselves to care about or participate in the world, they sleep too much and they lash out at people who are trying to help. As with most cause-oriented novels (such as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle), this book’s fictional elements are fairly thin. As the author states in his introduction, his characters are amalgams of many real soldiers he’s interviewed over the years. As a result, the book’s plentiful exposition is much more informative than dramatic. However, Zev, clearly a stand-in for the author, is a patient listener and a persistent prodder; he knows that “emotional injuries are every bit as valid as physical injuries,” and he’s keenly aware of how deep the roots of such injuries can go (“One guy tells a story about somebody’s grandfather who fought in Sinai more than 50 years ago and is still struggling with the symptoms”).
An often engaging portrait of damage and healing that will be invaluable to sufferers of PTSD and those who love them.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1492820307
Page Count: 298
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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