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THE SUGAR QUEEN

HOW GRIT, LOVE, AND A MYSTERIOUS GIFT BUILT A GREAT LIFE AND A BEAUTY EMPIRE

An arresting remembrance, as brave as the life it describes.

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A woman chronicles her triumph over youthful trauma to become a wildly successful entrepreneur. 

Debut author Kennedy was born in Welland—a small town in Ontario—in 1959, burdened by disadvantages. Her family was poor and her father, an alcoholic addicted to gambling, sexually abused her for years. The author was a fiercely independent youngster, “fearless and curious.” But despite academic talent, she dropped out of school when she was 14 years old. Yet even as a young girl, she was “infatuated with money,” had the “spirit of an entrepreneur,” and seemed destined to stake her own claim in the business world. After years of wandering shiftlessly from job to job, she experienced an auspicious confluence of events that changed her life. Kennedy suffered serious injuries in a horrific car crash and, as a result, received a $10,000 insurance payout. In addition, she saw a business owner discuss “body sugaring,” a process whereby unwanted hair is removed, on a television show. She contacted the owners of Alexandria Body Sugaring, and went into business with them, the first step on a path to founding her own global company, Alexandria Professional, now the “the gold standard in the field.” The author details, with admirably intimate and gripping candor, the arc of her professional life as well as her efforts to master her personal demons and forge an optimistic yet pragmatic spirituality that she learned from adversity: “It showed me that every time I apply my trust and belief in the Universe, in God, in my archangels—whatever it is that sustains us—and in myself, everything works out.” Kennedy’s life is captivatingly eventful, and her indefatigable perseverance remains uplifting. She truly lives by the motto “My favorite direction is onward.” Aspiring entrepreneurs should find not only moral encouragement in her tale, but also concrete lessons about business management. Still, the most intriguing element of the book is the author’s personal introspection—she openhandedly scours her life for meaning and purpose, and pieces together a spiritual worldview, partly the consequence of her experience of an inner voice that steers her toward safety and prosperity. Her reflections regarding her father are especially poignant. After he quit drinking—he faithfully attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings—he turned over a new leaf, and never assaulted her again. Amazingly, she eventually came to trust him again, even around her own young daughters. Forgiveness did not come so easily, and Kennedy’s depiction of her struggles to find it is profound and moving: “Forgiveness is like anything you do. When you practice it, it becomes easier. Forgiveness starts with understanding, with seeing and feeling the other person’s reality. When you practice that empathy, you understand more; when you understand more, it’s easier to apply the next time; when it’s easier to apply, it simply becomes a part of you.” Written in informally anecdotal prose, the author’s memoir is both dramatically absorbing and wise.

An arresting remembrance, as brave as the life it describes. 

Pub Date: March 25, 2019

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 524

Publisher: LNV Publishing Co.

Review Posted Online: March 28, 2019

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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