A sometimes-revealing but blandly written remembrance.
Psychoanalyst Williams’ (Demystifying Meaningful Coincidences [Synchronicities], 2015, etc.) recalls his time treating heroin addicts at a controversial New York City facility in this memoir, written with author and journalist Samberg (Some Kind of Lonely Clown, 2016, etc.).
In 1967, Williams, a “novice psychotherapist,” was offered a job at Odyssey House, a well-known heroin addiction research and treatment center on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The facility had recently been founded by Judianne Densen-Gerber, a highly driven psychiatrist. Six months after starting work, however, Williams says that he began to doubt Densen-Gerber’s methods and decided to keep a journal, whose entries form the basis of this memoir. Williams focuses on what he calls “Dr. Judi’s wild idea” of 24-hour group-therapy sessions, in which staff and residents came together to “dig for deeper truths.” Williams also asserts that Densen-Gerber had “rigid and authoritarian tendencies.” He attempts to understand why he was “mesmerized” by his enigmatic boss by describing his own upbringing and considering how he felt that the Odyssey House founder, who died in 2003, had “assumed the mantle” of his father in his life. The memoir’s co-author and editor, Samberg, conducted interviews with Williams to add “important details not recorded in the journal.” The authors mention that “at least half of the block on which Odyssey House was located could be described as urban squalor,” but readers who might be interested in what everyday life was actually like inside Odyssey House will be disappointed by the book’s lack of visual description. Instead, it often feels akin to an academic paper, with a delivery that will prove unpalatably dry for some: “Although mild punishments were sometimes necessary, they were never dispensed before careful evaluation of their potential for efficacy or futility.” The memoir does allude to specific residents by first name, such as Tyrone, but their stories have the manner of impersonal case studies. Overall, this book will prove useful to those interested in the methodologies adopted by Odyssey House. However, its sterile storytelling approach will deter casual readers.
A sometimes-revealing but blandly written remembrance.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2019
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
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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