Important, deeply compassionate insights on how to best prevent suicide.
In this debut memoir, a retired cop shares his life experiences and insights that contributed to his helping hundreds of people decide against suicide.
As a highway patrol officer, Briggs’ beat included San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge—a top suicide destination. Unhappy people are, just like tourists, drawn to the iconic landmark’s beautiful setting and mysterious fogs. “I know that every ten days or so, someone walks on the Bridge and never comes back,” writes Briggs of his two decades working the bridge, during which he lost only two people to suicide and helped to save more than 200. (A suicide-deterrent net is expected to be completed this year.) Now retired, Briggs is an advocate for suicide awareness and prevention. When he began, however, he had no training in such matters; what he did have was an awareness of his own losses, as well as severe health problems, grief, and depression, as detailed here with openness and honesty. His stints in the Army and as a San Quentin correctional officer also taught him to read people and situations. When approaching a suicidal person, Briggs recommends empathy, compassion, and adaptability; also crucial, he says, is focusing on the good and trying to find hope. He says to ask simple questions, such as, “Where are you from?” or “what are you doing tomorrow?” Leave ego out of it, he says; don’t be too loud, abrupt, or argumentative, and don’t deny their reality: “The first instinct when someone tells you their life is worthless is to say, ‘No, no it’s not.’ That feels like empathy to you, but to the person you’re talking to…it can feel like…one more stranger saying, ‘You’re wrong.’ ” This well-written, clear, and lively memoir helps to humanize the struggles of those in despair—including, at one point, Briggs’ own son. It offers a thoughtful, heartbreaking discussion of how suicide affects those left behind, together with revealing glimpses from one of the few survivors of a Golden Gate Bridge jump. Readers will be convinced of the importance of good crisis-intervention training and of prevention efforts, such as suicide barriers.
Important, deeply compassionate insights on how to best prevent suicide.Pub Date: July 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9904375-7-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ascend Books LLC
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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