A slim addition to a long bookshelf on depression.
A writerly account of the downward spiral of clinical depression.
Writing about one’s own depression presents unique challenges. Sinking into the abyss typically renders the writer incapable of writing, so such memoirs are almost invariably written well after the fact, with the writer describing what, at the time, seemed an affectless void. Prize-winning novelist Guterson (Ed King, 2011, etc.) differs from many in knowing specifically what triggered his depression and exactly when it started. He was in Washington, D.C., during the attacks of 9/11 and found himself not only devastated, but wondering how others could resume their lives, almost as if nothing had happened: “Anyone not despondent, I believed, was wearing blinders. The rightness of unhappiness was obvious and clear. The only reasonable response to the world was an overwhelming and excruciating sadness; everything else was willful delusion.” Reasonable enough, but neither his drive home to Washington state nor the months that followed lifted his spirits. Guterson consulted therapists, took pills and pondered suicide. It’s impossible to criticize the recovery and catharsis reflected in this manuscript, but it’s plain that he’s no longer at a loss for words and that those words seem self-consciously literary. Of discussing his condition with his family, he writes, “There is such a thing as filial indulgence and a manner of discourse possible between siblings that’s possible nowhere else. In other words, our dialogue was fraught with complication to the point of a compelling Freudian mootness.” Only in the last few pages does he turn the corner toward a recovery more gradual and less specifically causal (pills? time? love?) than the shock that blindsided him.
A slim addition to a long bookshelf on depression.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8041-6925-7
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
© Copyright 2026 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.
