As oddly engrossing as repeated slow-motion viewings of an accident in an amusement park.
Replete with all the angst and adolescent passion requisite in a coming-of-age memoir, stand-up comedian Abrahams’s debut features a special grabber—the expectation of the impending end of days.
The author was reared as a Jehovah’s Witness, convinced that the world as we know it would soon end. The word from the Kingdom Halls where Witnesses gathered was that nonbelievers would perish any minute now in a fiery apocalypse, the Great War of Armageddon. Therefore, the author knew that worldly things like birthday celebrations, divorces, Smurfs, Halloween, yard sales and sex with strangers must be avoided in favor of regular Bible study and knocking on sinners’ doors. Sister Kyria learned that “Jesus was the head over man; man was the head over woman; and woman was the head over cooking peach cobbler and shutting up.” Somehow she became interested in matters not covered in Watchtower, Awake! or meetings at the Pawtucket Kingdom Hall. These included e-mail flirtations, weed, vodka and, in particular, sex. Her co-religionists soon became convinced that Abrahams, once tagged as gifted, had been taken by a demon spirit. Readers will be convinced it was the spirit of a comic performer, doubtless acquired at her early Theocratic Ministry School appearances as well as later competitive poetry slams. She was, naturally, “disfellowshipped” and thus deprived of perpetual life. Undoubtedly the cleverest lapsed Jehovah’s Witness yet, Abrahams offers a graphic, mordant, wickedly distaff take on the first two decades of her current life. It’s a confessional talking cure, melancholy as well as funny as it chronicles unharmonious family life, a short miserable marriage, foul boyfriends, booze and pervasive naïveté.
As oddly engrossing as repeated slow-motion viewings of an accident in an amusement park.Pub Date: March 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5684-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
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
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