A sinuous, overstuffed reflection on living with a hoarder.
One woman's struggle to find her identity after growing up in a hoarder family.
From an early age, Batalion, a former comedian and art curator, knew there was something odd about her mother and the way she kept buying things and never throwing anything away. Yet, the moldering cans of tuna, the insect-infested flour, the piles of clothing, papers, telephones, fax machines, and every trinket imaginable felt like home, even if they threatened to overwhelm her. “When mom slept,” she writes, “the house could breathe. The walls exhaled, the roof slumped.” Ultimately, Batalion craved peace, order, and minimalism, things she could only begin to find when she finally left home and began her adult life. Told in often overwhelming detail, as if she's hoarding each event and word, the author traces her life story from early childhood, when she suffered from colitis, to her college years, when she experimented with various fashion styles and sex, to her unexpected rise to motherhood. She meanders through her family's Jewish heritage, bringing in memories of her Bubbie and of her mother's increasing paranoia and threats of suicide, juxtaposing them against her struggles to find herself amid her increasing obsessive-compulsive behaviors. The writing is dense, fraught with anxiety, and jumps back and forth in time, leaving readers with a bit of the bloat, as if there's too much information provided without a clear narrative line. Although Batalion tries to show how her connections to her grandmother, mother, and daughter have influenced her life, the circuitous route she takes leaves us wondering just what it is that she's trying to say. However, the descriptions of life in a hoarder home leave nothing to the imagination, making this a good read for those who may wonder if they have a hoarder in their midst.
A sinuous, overstuffed reflection on living with a hoarder.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-47311-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: NAL
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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