by Micah Toub ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 16, 2010
Uneven and glib.
The son of divorced Jungian therapists overanalyzes his childhood.
Globe & Mail relationship columnist Toub explores his upbringing and sexual forays through a psychotherapeutic lens. “All parents…mess with their kids’ heads,” he writes. “My parents’ being psychologists only changed the language of it.” Toub grew up in an eccentric, cerebral family in which morning dream analysis was par for the course and members said things like, “I am angry with you right now because the part of me represented by you is not being allowed to emerge into consciousness.” A protégée of famed psychotherapist Arnold Mindell, his mother left his father after meeting another man, and Toub chose to live with his father. There’s plenty of great material in the author’s past, and there are flashes of truly funny and outrageous dialogue. However, the memoir becomes mired in too much self-reflection, a stagnant structure and weak character development. Instead of telling a chronological story that might have illuminated how he came to be who he is, Toub opts to tell readers, at every turn, how his current research on Jung and Freud intersects with his adolescent experiences. For instance, he explains a two-year sexual relationship with another teenage boy as a “textbook example of how mother-son closeness leads to homosexuality.” (The author is now married to a woman.) His existential stasis—torn between pleasing his parents and casting off their rules and interpretations of everything—finally led him to see a therapist of his own. But despite stabs to take the reins of his life, Toub confesses, in the context of trying to cure a physical remedy by thinking about its symptoms, “I’d rather just continue feeling sorry for myself than admit it’s me who is causing the illness.”
Uneven and glib.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-393-06755-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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