by James Osowski ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 2015
An honest, if truncated, account of a long struggle with mental illness.
A debut memoir recalls one man’s life with schizophrenia.
Having been diagnosed as a schizophrenic, Osowski explains that he spent years experiencing the Jesus Christ syndrome: “I took on the guilt of the entire world. I took the blame, inside, for the weather, the earthquakes and plane crashes.” Writing in an “attempt to share myself with others,” the author details a mental illness that has often left him in difficult, even unthinkable, positions. From brutal stints in jail (“a certain person might lay into me, punching me, spitting at me, taking all my few possessions”) to the inability to trust his own mind (“I walked around in total fear of what my mind saw, where it would take me next, or if I would ever be able to come back to living in the real world”). The opportunity for disaster was always available. After all, how can Osowski live even a semblance of a normal life when his mind tells him he has committed all the crimes mentioned on the news? Incarceration is a clear result: “I have been locked up for many crimes I did commit and twice for crimes that never happened.” Though such details are telling, some portions of the book might have benefited from greater elaboration. This is the case when the author states rather casually that “I went through three different relationships; and later, started a family.” The reader is left wondering about these relationships. How did they form? What were they like? How did they end? At under 100 pages, however, the story is inherently brief and, ultimately, positive. Writing that “life for me is no longer burdened down with those old delusions and the pain that went along with it,” Osowski radiates a sense that things will get better not just for him, but also for those who can gain perspective from his experiences. The author tells readers to keep in mind many misconceptions about those afflicted with schizophrenia: “We are not terrible people out to hurt anyone!”
An honest, if truncated, account of a long struggle with mental illness.Pub Date: June 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5152-7507-7
Page Count: 86
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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