A brief but poignant memoir.
A nonfiction writer and teacher’s debut memoir about a loving but fraught relationship with her brother and the addiction to drugs they both shared.
Ackerman’s early childhood in New York was mostly happy, marred only by the occasional envy she felt for her older brother Skyler’s elaborate Lego constructions. “Life is so comfortable,” she writes about that time, “so nice, so perfectly placed out in front of us.” But beneath the facade of comfortable routine, cracks began to appear that Ackerman could not understand. One morning, her mother suddenly threatened to drive the car into the Hudson River. Sometimes her parents fought or behaved in ways that seemed cruel, and occasionally, her mother pushed her unwilling brother to do things like skate across the ice too fast in skates too big for his feet because she wanted her son to “earn accomplishments” and “be the best.” Worse still, her brother seemed to be growing up faster than she was, leaving her to feel that she was trapped in perpetual childhood. The author’s consolation was that Skyler would be there to save her, just as the perpetual motion machine he had created for a science class would save humanity when the world “stop[ped] spinning.” After the family moved to Florida, her and her brother’s lives took a turn for the worse. Skyler, “the ‘A’ student...[and] next big deal,” began to experiment with alcohol and then drugs. Following suit, Ackerman began dealing marijuana when she entered her teens and then later became a junkie who got high on everything from MDMA to oxycodone. But where her brother sank into a suicidal depression that took over his life, the author gradually found her way back to a fragile sobriety. Told in simple, spare language, Ackerman’s story is powerful not only for the story it tells, but also for the eloquent silences and chronological ruptures that symbolize the painfully fractured nature of her life and that of her brother.
A brief but poignant memoir.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59709-691-1
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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