by Caroline Kraus ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2004
A vivid portrait of a complex relationship, as gripping, at times, as a good thriller.
Disturbing first-person account of one young woman’s emotional captivity by another.
Kraus was 23, grieving for her mother who had just died of cancer, and alone in a new city when she met Jane, a pretty, amusing young woman who seemed to offer empathy and camaraderie. Both worked at a bookstore in San Francisco, where Kraus, a recent college graduate from the Midwest, was planning to study screenwriting at Stanford. Within short order, the co-workers became fast friends and then roommates and then more. Gradually, Kraus’s life was taken over by Jane, her plans for graduate work put aside. Jane, manipulative and seductive, alternating between sweetness and cruelty, seemed to need Kraus’s love and support, and Kraus gave both generously. The inheritance her mother left her was wiped out and credit-card debt mounted as Kraus willingly supported them both. While the author’s father, brother, and sister became alarmed by the unhealthy relationship developing between the two women, and her psychiatrist tried to open her eyes to the source of her need for Jane, the warning signs that Jane was bad news passed by Kraus undetected. Promiscuity, shoplifting, stealing cash at work, gratuitous lies, emotional blackmail, and physical violence were par for the course for Jane, yet through the strife, Kraus says, were times of great happiness, affection, sharing, and fun. It was only when Kraus heard an NPR documentary on borderline personality disorder that she recognized that she had become deeply entangled with a seriously disturbed individual and that she herself was slipping into Jane’s world. Once able to see Jane clearly, Kraus made her escape, fleeing San Francisco. That her freedom was only temporary is a shock, for Jane was welcomed back when she reappeared in Kraus’s life a couple of years later. When they parted for the second time, it was because, Kraus says, she had learned to value her own needs over Jane’s.
A vivid portrait of a complex relationship, as gripping, at times, as a good thriller.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7679-1403-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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