A brave and inspiring account of a movement through pain to a complex reckoning and self-recovery.
A memoir about confronting trauma and working toward healing.
In this frank and often searing narrative, Nikolidakis examines what she describes as monstrous abuses perpetrated by her father, who, after leaving her family, murdered his new girlfriend and her daughter before committing suicide. Setting forth “my truth—the emotional truth of my experiences,” the author recounts how she was stunned by the violence that might easily have included her or other family members and slowly began a painful investigation into the wide-ranging impact of her father’s malignancy. She insightfully explores her family’s well-concealed dysfunction, her descent into alcoholism and promiscuity as a teenager, and her long-standing efforts to deny the reality of the psychological and physical torments. Particularly vivid (and harrowing) are those passages that reflect on the divide between her father’s charismatic public presence and the cruelty of his private life. With compelling clarity and eloquence, she anatomizes his ability to manipulate: “I remember nearly a dozen such apologies from those years, each of them cried and slumped, his head held and bowed until I offered forgiveness. I always did, partly because it got him out of my room, but mostly because I believed him. To see grief so close up, to inspect it and work out the algebra of its accuracy, filled me with shame, as though lying near his shame released its contagion.” Nikolidakis concludes by explaining how her search for understanding took her to her father’s homeland in Greece and Crete, where she found a sense of spiritual renewal in reconnecting with his extended family. The text is convincing and memorable in suggesting that the author was, ultimately, able to accept the final unknowability of what drove her father’s destructiveness and to transcend the rage and self-loathing he wrought.
A brave and inspiring account of a movement through pain to a complex reckoning and self-recovery.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-542-03771-6
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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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