A slim, thoughtful, and candid account of a single, sober mother seeking fulfillment.
Journalist and musician Lerner shares lessons that she learned while recovering from alcoholism in this debut essay collection.
The author says that she started a blog in the hope of combating a stereotype that she calls “The Guy in the Trench Coat”—a visual of a disheveled man, lingering on a street corner with a pint bottle of liquor in his pocket. She says that this idea of an alcoholic lingers not only in the minds of the general public, but also in those of addicts: “During my brief career as a problem drinker, I didn’t think I had a problem,” she writes in her introduction to this book. “Why not? Because I never turned into The Guy in the Trench Coat.” The essays collected here discuss Lerner’s five years as a drinker and eight years of sobriety, focusing particularly on the ways that her addiction related to her identity as a single mother who was unlucky in love. The essays, rarely longer than three pages in length, provide snapshots into the recovery process, addressing temptation, longing for approval, and figuring out how to fill one’s day, absent the structure that drinking provides. Some cover difficult moments, such as when Lerner met her recovering-alcoholic ex for lunch, and he told her that he’d received a terminal health diagnosis—and was drinking again. Others deal with more quotidian topics, such as Lerner’s inability to finish the E.L. James novel Fifty Shades of Grey because she didn’t find it relatable. The author offers many bits of useful wisdom, as when she says, “A gentle ‘no’ is the essence of sober behavior—just as important to master as a thoughtful ‘yes.’ ” Overall, her book illustrates how varied the experience of alcoholism can be, and how much of recovery is concerned with things other than the fear of relapse. It will likely appeal most to readers whose midlife drinking problems developed as a means of coping with other difficult issues. Such problems are not erased by sobriety, Lerner points out, but she effectively shows how her sobriety allowed her to finally confront other problems.
A slim, thoughtful, and candid account of a single, sober mother seeking fulfillment.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 132
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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