A stark and illuminating, if repetitive, portrayal of relentless inner turmoil.
A writer recounts his battle with mental disorders as well as his love for a woman fighting addiction.
Witte opens this memoir by detailing his troubled childhood, during which he suffered parental abuse and suicidal tendencies. This led to alcohol and drug addictions and, later, his struggles to achieve sobriety for eight years in Alcoholics Anonymous. But the bulk of this book takes place in San Francisco over a relatively short period, after the author had been sober for two years. At an AA meeting, he was immediately smitten with a new member named Jessica. Though he hadn’t relapsed in some time, Witte had long endured several maladies, including epilepsy, bipolar disorder, and general anxiety. But his greatest challenge may have been what he eventually determined was narcissism. He was anti-social and frequently confrontational with people, taking glee in publicly berating them. The love he ultimately felt for Jessica gave him incentive to overcome this condition. But Jessica had her own problems, as recurrent migraines led to myriad hospital visits, which the author soon suspected she feigned for access to meds. The two were tortured souls who could either help each other or fall together. From the beginning, Witte clearly acknowledges that his insults were offensive; he derided people’s various attributes, from their weight to advanced age, and criticized such minor defects as speaking too loudly. But his provocative book is ultimately about self-reflection. Likewise, the author convincingly parallels his condition with Jessica’s, as the two seemingly resist the help that they clearly need. Despite Witte’s rough prose, the ideas are lucid: The author speaks at AA meetings about religion, both as a support for members and an analogy for recovery (often citing AA’s “the Big Book”). The story is enlightening but redundant, as his arguments—such as warnings about blind faith and others’ concepts of God—rarely change.
A stark and illuminating, if repetitive, portrayal of relentless inner turmoil.Pub Date: July 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5219-9033-9
Page Count: 236
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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