Enlightening words and drawings show how it can feel inside when outside life appears to be just fine.
A cartoonist’s graphic memoir of OCD.
Though he had previously dealt with obsessive routines, Katzenstein traces his full-blown OCD to his parents’ divorce, when “cracks form[ed] in my world, little gaps between what should be and what [wa]s. The cracks ma[d]e me furious. Everything ma[d]e me furious.” From that childhood explanation, the author spins a narrative of being trapped within a personal hell, one that makes it difficult to connect with other people, leaves him hiding, and occasionally renders him unable to get out of bed. As a germophobe, he can never shower or wash his hands enough. As an adolescent, he realized that he had “a diagnosed mental illness,” he writes, “and even as I begin to understand my strange behaviors as compulsions, I keep behaving compulsively.” Yet life continued. Katzenstein went to college, fell in love, and found solace in “a steady diet of partying, drinking too much, reveling in an insane myopia.” The author continued to draw and was ecstatic when, after much rejection, one of his cartoons was accepted by the New Yorker. It “was the single coolest moment of my career,” one that felt so good that he initially expected all of his problems to go away. They didn’t, of course. Katzenstein tried a variety of therapies (cognitive et al.), and he improved in fits and starts. But he has always worried that his creativity and OCD are inextricably linked. Interspersed throughout are illustrations of Sisyphus pushing the bolder up the hill, occasionally in danger of being crushed by it. There are also some astonishing drawings of how it feels to have his brain blowing apart from within, which contrast with others showing his attempts to keep things under control. As he notes, he is “an anxious cartoonist,” and this is his story.
Enlightening words and drawings show how it can feel inside when outside life appears to be just fine.Pub Date: June 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-295007-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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 compelling, often chilling look inside today’s version of the Gulag.
The WNBA star recounts her imprisonment by the Putin regime.
“My horror begins in a land I thought I knew, on a trip I wish I hadn’t taken,” writes Griner. She had traveled to Russia before, playing basketball for the Yekaterinburg franchise of the Russian league during the WNBA’s off-season, but on this winter day in 2022, she was pulled aside at the Moscow airport and subjected to an unexpected search that turned up medically prescribed cannabis oil. As the author notes, at home in Arizona, cannabis is legal, but not in Russia. After initial interrogation—“They seemed determined to get me to admit I was a smuggler, some undercover drug lord supplying half the country”—she was bundled off to await a show trial that was months in coming. With great self-awareness, the author chronicles the differences between being Black and gay in America and in Russia. “When you’re in a system with no true justice,” she writes, “you’re also in a system with a bunch of gray areas.” Unfortunately, despite a skilled Russian lawyer on her side, Griner had trouble getting to those gray areas, precisely because, with rising tensions between the U.S. and Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s people seemed intent on making an example of her. Between spells in labor camps, jails, and psych wards, the author became a careful observer of the Russian penal system and its horrors. Navigating that system proved exhausting; since her release following an exchange for an imprisoned Russian arms dealer (about which the author offers a le Carré–worthy account of the encounter in Abu Dhabi), she has been suffering from PTSD. That struggle has invigorated her, though, in her determination to free other unjustly imprisoned Americans, a plea for which closes the book.
A compelling, often chilling look inside today’s version of the Gulag.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9780593801345
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
BOOK REVIEW
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