Having affectingly grappled with the demons that led to her mother’s suicide in Searching for Mercy Street (1994), Sexton takes on her own in this stinging chronicle of a road to three attempted suicides.
The author begins the story, and punctuates it throughout, by revisiting her mother’s mental illness. Anne Sexton, the celebrated confessional poet, came from a long line of depressives. Though she may have passed a suicide gene along to her daughter, she also did much to nurture the urge, speaking to her of the voices in her head, accusing her daughter of being the one who made her sick and being altogether too confessional when it came to lovers and sex. So Sexton fille had plenty of fuel for her own depression, which was voracious and amplified by motherhood, a grim cocktail of loneliness, grief, despair, migraines, a bipolarism that swung between gloom and agitation (no euphoric highs here) and a terrible descent from mind pain to physical pain. Sexton is a dark wizard at describing her misery, which effectively turned her into a zombie, and the impulses that drove her to start cutting herself: “It’s a way of letting the poison out. Taking control again…It makes the voice in my head shut up. To bleed is a way of knowing you’re alive.” The author provokes both scorn and sympathy, and she ably captures both the corrosive emotional storm in her head and the exhausted wariness she produces in others. Only occasionally does she overwrite—“I was ready to make music with the keyboard of my wrist”—and lose the scouring immediacy of her condition, when “[s]uicide simply came up from behind and took me in a bear hug” and she became “a mother who, as her own mother before her, had lost her grip on love.”
An elucidating, caustic engagement with the author’s depression.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-58243-718-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2022 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
