An intimate and unsparing book of self-reflection.
A therapist and writer reflects on how alcoholism unexpectedly overtook her at midlife.
Cohen (Spent: Exposing Our Complicated Relationship with Shopping, 2014, etc.) “didn’t fall in love with alcohol early in life.” From adolescence onward, her real addiction was romance. Boys were her “salvation” from the pain of feeling unlovable. Only later was she able to admit they were what she used to stay away from relationships or when she got into them, “keep a foot out the door.” After Cohen left an unfulfilling first marriage in her late 30s, she flung herself into the dating world by sleeping with a series of men over the next year. The last man, Bob, was one to whom she felt an especially intense attraction. Wine became their aphrodisiac of choice, “lubricat[ing] our conversations and enhanc[ing] our already fiery libidos.” When they first got together, the author only drank when she was with him or with their friends. Her drinking worsened after she realized that Bob still felt a deep attachment to his first wife. Despite going to the gym, Cohen began gaining weight; she knew it was the amount of wine she had been drinking. Eventually, her relationship with Bob settled into a predictable cycle of withdrawal and reconnection. Marriage only made the situation worse between them: Eventually Bob took a lover and paraded her in front of Cohen. After the author fell deeply in love with another man who, like Bob, could not detach from a previous relationship, she finally began to work on her intimacy issues and start a moderation management program to lessen her use of alcohol. Unapologetic in that it offers no trite “darkness to light” narrative about alcoholism, Cohen’s book instead offers a sharp-eyed look at what it means to be a midlife female unable to cope with either personal demons or the heavy external social pressures placed on women.
An intimate and unsparing book of self-reflection.Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4926-5219-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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