Emotionally taxing yet powerfully uplifting.
In this debut memoir, a tenacious young woman battles a rare, life-threatening disease that leaves her unable to eat.
Aboulafia, now a law student, had only one semester of her undergraduate studies left in December 2015. She awoke one morning with a strong sense that the carefree joy of her life was about to abruptly end. Diagnosed with an immune deficiency at birth, the author was all too familiar with illnesses from whooping cough to scarlet fever. But the symptoms that she now began to experience were new and unnerving. Specifically, she began to develop trouble eating. At first, this manifested itself as feeling full for many hours after meals, but then she started to become nauseated when faced with certain foods. As the symptoms intensified, her weight dropped worryingly, so she visited her gastroenterologist, who dismissed her symptoms as psychosomatic and suggested that she was anorexic. It was only when her condition became life-threatening, with her weight dropping to around 70 pounds, that doctors recognized her as having an extremely rare disorder called superior mesenteric artery syndrome. Two days before her 22nd birthday, she was even told by a doctor that she could possibly die in six weeks. What follows is an alarmingly honest story of the author’s battle against chronic illness. It’s unsurprising that Aboulafia has a background in law, as she’s unafraid to present cold, clear facts: “I was so thin because I had been starving, because I was literally dying, and I didn’t know how long I had left if the surgery didn’t work.” This matter-of-fact approach makes for an emotional narrative, as the author also relates the pivotal roles that her girlfriend, family, and religion played in her recovery: “I talked to God until the sun came up, filling up my hospital room and showing me again, firsthand, that I was alive.” From an author who deems herself to be a “lover, not a fighter,” this is a courageous and emotionally sensitive recollection of a terrifying battle.
Emotionally taxing yet powerfully uplifting.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 287
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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 Yorker staff 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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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