Tons of tragicomic wisdom packed into a short memoir.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder is no laughing matter. Unless laughter is your best defense against it.
In this slim work of nonfiction, debut writer Jordan, a longtime OCD sufferer, is by turns humorous, snarky, angry and thoughtful. This is a personal and anecdotal account of what OCD is and what it’s like to suffer from it 24/7. The book has an interesting and telling provenance. In late 2012, Jordan was at the end of his rope: dead-end job, junker car and few friends. So his friend Tony—we should all have friends like Tony—challenged him to write a book in 30 days. This is that book. In a work like this, voice is all-important. Who is this guy who has buttonholed us? Well, he’s a chatty and good, accessible writer when he’s on his game. He is likable; the reader will probably root for him. Each chapter is a sort of running commentary on the disease itself, the mental health system, therapies, others’ reactions and so forth. And each chapter ends with a particular anecdote under the heading “Great Moment in OCD History.” Some of these are horrifying (from the OCD sufferer’s point of view), but most also show the sufferer’s courage and mordant humor. The book is somewhat repetitious. We are all aware of the OCD obsession with germs, real and imagined, and compulsive hand-washing. For Jordan, public restrooms are like Dante’s lowest circle of hell. But after the third or fourth example, the reader more than gets it. Jordan, a committed Christian, has struggled to come to terms with OCD and with God. Is he angry? Well, he has been. But God, he is told, is strong enough to take a lot of abuse. And then he says, “Maybe I needed to be broken....Being broken sucks, there is no getting around it, but once you are broken, you can be rebuilt into something better.”
Tons of tragicomic wisdom packed into a short memoir.Pub Date: July 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482530223
Page Count: 90
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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