A woman discovers her husband is not whom she thought he was.
Waite met Marco at work; he was the new bar manager, and she was working as a waitress “to make the money that did not seem to be materializing from my acting and modeling careers.” They went out for drinks even though Waite had a long-distance relationship with another man. “He was sexy and mysterious and all of a sudden I wanted him more than I had wanted anything in my life,” she writes. Before long, they were a couple and moved in together; she agreed to help fund Marco’s lifetime dream of opening a restaurant; they got pregnant and married. Then their perfect life fell apart when Waite discovered Marco was cheating on her and had been for quite some time. Alternating between two time frames—before finding out about the affair and after—the author slowly unravels the complexity of lies and disillusions she suffered because of Marco. The tension, disbelief, and grief permeate the pages as Waite chronicles how she obsessively checked Marco’s email and Facebook accounts for proof of his infidelity. The author makes palpable her inability to cope with the enormity of her situation and the confusion and fear for what a divorce would mean for her newborn child. Her recounting of the events gives readers an up-close look at the psychological damage that occurs when one partner falls completely for another and ignores the gut instincts and warning signs that the relationship may not be what it seems. Those who have been in a manipulative partnership with a narcissistic or abusive person will find Waite’s honest retelling relevant and potent. Many will find they can use this as a guidebook of what to watch out for so they don’t make the same mistakes that the author did.
A frank and visceral dual timeline shows the romance and failure of a woman’s marriage to a psychopath.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1646-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | PSYCHOLOGY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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