A revealing, if at times tedious, chronicle of the first year of a corporate executive’s retirement.
A high-powered executive decides to dedicate her retirement to a spiritual, emotional, and physical transformation in this debut journal of a New Age seeker.
For 36 years, Ramsey was the main breadwinner for her family, working in the upper echelons of retail administration to support an affluent lifestyle for herself and her stay-at-home husband, Rich, who did most of the work to maintain their household. As her retirement approached, she found herself suddenly demoted from VIP to PIP: “a previously important person,” facing the daunting prospect of structuring a new life and identity to fill her free schedule. She approached the task with gusto, devoting herself to “meditation, exercise, healthy food, painting, studying, and time with friends.” As her retirement began, she made a commitment to document her journey in a daily journal for one year. The author’s process includes both the sublime, such as a trip to a luxury retreat in Arizona and a European odyssey, and the mundane, from the sleepless frustration of training a new puppy to the agonizing trauma of trying to help a self-destructive sibling make more life-affirming choices. Throughout the pivotal year, Ramsey’s tone is open and inquisitive, whether examining the changes in sexuality in long-term relationships or the differences and similarities between Islam and Christianity. The author is a committed and candid diarist, disclosing the missteps and insecurities as well as the pleasures and achievements of her retired life. Her writing is conversational and cogent, and some sections provide a short course in the religious principles that Ramsey studied during the year. Some readers may tire of the overly detailed descriptions of sustainably produced dinners and puppy pooping schedules that make the text seem repetitious and overlong. Others may be alienated by the unacknowledged privilege of the author and Rich’s situation, which allows them to leave their two unruly dogs to attend obedience school without them as they depart for a tour of Europe. But the depiction of a family’s struggle to help an addicted relative is heartfelt, and Ramsey’s quest to find meaning in life after her busy career is documented with openness and sincerity.
A revealing, if at times tedious, chronicle of the first year of a corporate executive’s retirement.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 488
Publisher: Clovercroft Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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