An engaging read and an enticing peek into the secret lives of two celebrated families.
A fascinating, if sometimes scattershot, memoir detailing the author’s life in a dysfunctional family.
Burlingham’s (The Starlings in London, 2016) life history is complicated. Now in her fourth marriage (this time to her college sweetheart), she reflects on the combination of forces that resulted in so much turmoil. She is the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Lewis Tiffany, “maker of silver and fine jewelry,” the great-granddaughter of Louis Comfort Tiffany, “the creator of Tiffany glass,” and the granddaughter of Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, disciple and companion of Anna Freud. Grandmother Dorothy turned her back on the glamorous Tiffany lifestyle—and the dark outbursts of her father’s rages—when she married surgeon Robert Burlingham. Unfortunately, Robert was bipolar, and his manic periods terrified Dorothy. Four children later, she packed up her brood, left America, and headed to Vienna, undertaking psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud and placing her two oldest children (including the author’s father) in analysis with Sigmund’s daughter, Anna. Dorothy’s close friendship with Anna became a dominating, and much resented, factor during Burlingham’s formative years. When the Freuds moved to London in 1938, Dorothy followed, eventually moving in with Anna. The author was born and raised in America, but she, her parents (Bob and Rigmor Burlingham), and four siblings moved to London for six years in 1957. Her father had suffered a mental breakdown and took his family with him when he returned to Anna to resume lifelong psychoanalysis. The memoir whiplashes back and forth in time as Burlingham alternates between chronological storytelling about her ancestors and vignettes from her own childhood and adolescence. The jumps can be a bit jarring, but they present short events that effectively serve to illustrate, rather than directly state, the frustrations, loneliness, and considerable anger Burlingham experienced as she sought attention and approval from a father who was emotionally unavailable. Readers may agree with the author’s negative assessment of endless psychoanalysis—especially given the bizarre dynamic of her father receiving treatment from his mother’s companion. These two women were far closer to him than were his own children. Ironically, the memoir itself reads much like the author’s own passage through a long psychoanalytic tunnel. She did get one thing from her Tiffany heritage: her father shared with her an appreciation of beautiful precious and, especially, semiprecious stones. She uses them as an interesting literary device to introduce different periods and people in her life. Expressive prose eases readers through a very personal exploration of the underbelly of a complex family: “I never went with [my father] on his solitary walks. Alone, he ambled along the chilly shoreline, especially on sunny days when light shone through the wet stones, revealing their yellow-orange to reddish-brown to rich red tones.” Photos are included.
An engaging read and an enticing peek into the secret lives of two celebrated families.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 212
Publisher: The Amber Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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