An intensely honest and engrossing account of a young man’s struggles to calm his demons.
A writer with bipolar disorder portrays the highs and lows of his psychotic episodes in this memoir.
Raised in an upper-middle-class, loving home with two siblings, the young Stevens firmly believed life was good. Although shorter than most of his peers in high school, through relentless training and a fierce competitive spirit, he excelled at basketball. He was elected team captain in his senior year. But severe hallucinations began in his freshman year at college. Clouds in the sky talked to him and turned into a lion, a bunny, and then a king wearing a crown. “I am a king,” he thought. This led to his first confinement in a psychiatric hospital. There would be two more psychotic episodes resulting in hospitalization, until he learned to identify and cope with the triggers for his mania. The author’s forthright prose graphically illustrates his varying states of mind: “I looked up and saw a gorilla with my face on the ceiling fighting a wolf….The wolf ripped my head off and chewed on it. I swallowed with fear.” At the beginning of his candid and absorbing memoir, Stevens delivers a vivid description of a manic escapade, capturing the ferocity of his flights from reality and the strange aftermaths. He was in “a packed pizza shop” and yelled, “Shut the fuck up! I’ve had enough of you all talking behind my back!” When a guy tried to help, the author pushed him back over a table. About 30 men were ready to eject him so he charged “toward the door” and “was met by punches.” But once out on the street, he writes, “I stood up like nothing had happened and went about my day.” Despite his illness, the author displays great self-confidence while discussing his accomplishments during his nonmanic periods, when he could harness his energy and singular focus into productive endeavors. He was a firebrand door-to-door salesman for an office products company, earned “$100,000” playing poker, and became general manager of a fitness club chain and vice president of his brother’s software company—all before the age of 29. This illuminating book should especially appeal to readers coping with bipolar disorder and their families and friends.
An intensely honest and engrossing account of a young man’s struggles to calm his demons.Pub Date: April 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64544-049-9
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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