It’s hard to find much solace within the relentless gloom—however insightfully explored—of one writer’s depression.
A writer reflects on her unceasing struggle with clinical depression.
Although Merkin (The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontës, and the Importance of Handbags, 2014, etc.) is an undeniably talented writer, this memoir of her depression is as tough to read as it must have been to write. This is “the book about depression that I had been contacted to write by three successive publishing houses over the course of more than a decade,” and the author admits that “my daughter has been dealing with the reality of my depression for so much of her life that I’m convinced it half bores her.” Many readers will feel the same way, no matter how much they empathize with a writer who confesses, “most of all I am tired of myself and my battles.” In the first sentence, Merkin introduces “the allure of suicide,” an option that never goes away. She believes in the benefits of decades of therapy and medication, without which it’s doubtful she would have been able to write this book. The author writes that the “root cause” of her depression is “the nature of the family itself, as rotten at its core as Hamlet’s Denmark,” and she builds a convincing case, particularly in regard to her cold, neglectful parents—though she finds it impossible to extricate herself from the mother who has ruined her. Hospital stays (the last was eight years ago) have provided respite and occasionally companionship, but circumstances have been rarely much better upon her exit. Merkin has deeply ambivalent feelings about electroshock treatment, resisting a doctor’s suggestion of how much she would benefit and then regretting her refusal. Those who have read her incisive and well-crafted pieces as a staff writer for the New Yorker and a frequent contributor to the New York Times and Elle will wonder how she managed to get any work done when she was feeling so bad.
It’s hard to find much solace within the relentless gloom—however insightfully explored—of one writer’s depression.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-14036-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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