A smart, empowering work about self-discovery that features strong prose and intriguing takes on self-help strategies.
In this memoir, entrepreneur and public speaker Pollak (Soul Proprietor, 2001, etc.) recounts the dissolution of her marriage and the subsequent realizations that changed her life.
The 70-year-old author grew up in White Plains, New York, a wealthy suburb of New York City. As an adult, she spent years reflecting on how she “should have been happy” but never truly was. She says that her critical mother instilled in her a sense of codependency and a need to please that would haunt Pollak throughout her adult life, particularly in her 37-year marriage. However, she says that her husband, Ben, a dynamic, beloved teacher at an elite school, was a moody, distant figure at home, thwarting her desire to create the perfect vision of a happy family. In this memoir, she narrates the slow deterioration of their marriage, writing about the “parallel lives” they led after their children were grown. Along the way, the book shifts back and forth in time, as she tells of her attempts to gain self-understanding and regain a sense of self-worth. The most compelling parts of the book detail Pollak’s toxic friendships, especially one with a woman whom she came to see as a stand-in for her own mother. The author’s obsession eventually led her to join a program for people in unhealthy relationships. Her interpretation of relationships in a 12-step frame offers a refreshing change from other addiction narratives. However, Pollak relies too heavily on the language of self-help and pop psychology; early on, for instance, she identifies herself and her family members through the lens of self-help author John Bradshaw: “my older sister (the Scapegoat in Bradshaw’s model).” Her memoir is at its best when she puts forth her own voice, effectively synthesizing complex feelings into powerful, revealing phrases: “Intimacy once removed was delicious,” she writes regarding codependency. “Too close, and it felt like a burden.” It’s also inspiring when Pollak narrates her decision to move away from the suburbs after her divorce so that she could become the Manhattanite that she always wanted to be.
A smart, empowering work about self-discovery that features strong prose and intriguing takes on self-help strategies.Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-527-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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