A colorful, faith-based memoir of recovery.
In his debut memoir, Cole recounts his struggles with eating disorders, substance abuse, and mental illness.
Even in childhood, Cole had problems: overweight, asthmatic, and a chronic bed-wetter, he was picked on at school and performed poorly in gym class. Though his parents were attentive and loving, Cole grew up feeling cursed “that God had made a mistake, that [his] body was an accident.” Beginning with an addictive relationship to junk food, he made his way through periods of infatuation with dieting, God, penis enlargement, and recreational drugs before landing in rehab for alcoholism while still in high school. Yet none of that was as bad as his first psychotic episode: at 18, while a freshman at the University of Georgia, Cole became convinced that he was Jesus Christ and attempted to perform miracles, believing that his arresting officers were leading him to his own crucifixion. Cole’s yearslong path to a stable life was a maze of denial, confusion, relapse, and recovery, though it was one that ultimately led to a place of health, love, and faith. Now a life coach, the author hopes his story may offer guidance for those who have suffered similarly. Addiction, disordered eating, and manic depression are each, by themselves, tremendous hurdles, and the mere fact that Cole has weathered all three makes his account remarkable. His tone is open and accessible, though he often allows his prose to drift toward melodrama. Describing a friend’s funeral, at which the Beatles’ “Let It Be” played, Cole writes, “instead of ‘words of wisdom,’ all I heard were words of confusion.” The complexity of Cole’s flaws and the roller coaster of his life (along with his religiosity, which manifests in ways that are both harmful and benign) create a unique, compelling narrative. Readers may not reach the same conclusions about life that Cole does, but chances are good that they will walk away from this book with at least a pinch of awe.
A colorful, faith-based memoir of recovery.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-941758-14-4
Page Count: 237
Publisher: Inkshares
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2015
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
