Here’s a lesson in how to take a potentially intriguing idea and beat it to death. Gilliam opens by noting she is not a medical expert on addiction, does not have a medical degree, is not an expert on the psychological causes or sociological aspects of addiction, and does not have a psychology degree. Not exactly a trust-inspiring beginning. Indeed, Gilliam’s lack of expertise soon becomes apparent. Although she has a perfectly valid premise, that 12-step programs in general and Alcoholics Anonymous in particular, are not right for everyone, she ruins the idea by repeating herself ad nauseam. Just how many times do we need to hear that fear holds us back while love empowers us? Gilliam, who was once addicted to alcohol, cocaine, cigarettes, and bingeing and purging, tried AA off and on for ten years before concluding that its focus on a higher outside power and its insistence that people never actually fully recover from their “disease” is a detriment rather than an aid in permanent recovery. She cites the high failure rate——Seventy percent of those who achieve sobriety in AA relapse within five years— as part of her proof. The reason, she says, is that AA and other 12-step programs treat the symptoms rather than the emotional and psychological problems actually causing the addictions. It is only by looking inward and learning to view the world with love that true understanding and with it the loss of any cravings can be achieved. The pitfalls inherent in this simplistic approach are obvious. Take this passage on healing yourself with love: “ . . . watch in amazement as all of your relationships become easier, less stressful, and more harmonious as you simply let go of all your fearful, defensive, attacking thoughts toward another and send them thoughts only of love.” The volume concludes with a helpful annotated list of alternative programs, including contact numbers. As an account of one woman—a battle with addiction, this has its virtues. As a general critique of 12-step programs, it leaves a lot to be desired. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 5, 1998
ISBN: 0-688-15587-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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