Courageous, heartbreaking, infuriating, and ultimately victorious; a significant contribution to the cycle-of-abuse...
A debut memoir details generations of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse that ultimately tears a dysfunctional family apart.
Stein’s grandfather was a nasty alcoholic who raped at least one of his own daughters. Gigi, the author’s mother, was 13 years old when her own mom walked out on the family, leaving her five daughters to fend for themselves against their abusive father. Gigi quickly took up with an older man, Marco Rossi, becoming pregnant at 15. It was a devastating blow to her when her little boy died from a heart defect at 3. She and Marco went on to have three more children before they finally broke up. Next came Henry McCardle. Henry bought a house for Gigi and her young children and added two kids of his own to the household. He and Gigi had three more. Both Marco and Henry were womanizers and heavy drinkers. Marco was a violent drunk and Henry was a sexual predator. While Henry was away on “business trips,” Gigi hit the local bars. It was within this amalgam of siblings, half siblings, and absentee parents that Stein was raised. By the age of 7, the author writes, “I already knew that I had two mothers—a good, comforting one whom I loved, and a mean, foul-mouthed drunk who could withdraw that love without warning.” The eye-opening narrative by Stein (writing under a pseudonym) is riveting. Describing the family code of secrecy and denial, she asserts: “Our family was one in which silences about deeply troubling matters were normal, and indeed required.” Some of the darker family secrets are kept closeted for a major portion of the jaw-dropping memoir. One of these concerns Henry and Gigi’s children and is likely to cause readers confusion. It is a disconcerting absence of information, but it gives readers a sense of the turmoil the author experienced for many decades.
Courageous, heartbreaking, infuriating, and ultimately victorious; a significant contribution to the cycle-of-abuse literature.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64293-118-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bombardier Books
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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