Despite a rushed ending and a difficult narrator, the book is an exact, revealing and intermittently moving portrait of a...
As an adventurous young magazine writer for Vanity Fair, Zeman traveled the globe in pursuit of compelling subjects; in this searing memoir, he turns his reporter's gaze inward.
With unflinching precision and a welcome dose of gallows humor, the author catalogues his lifelong struggle with depression and numerous attempts to combat it. When standard talk therapy in combination with various prescription drugs proved ineffective, Zeman turned to ECT (electroconvulsive therapy), the “method of last resort.” Formerly known as electroshock therapy and heavily associated in the minds of most people, including the author, with extreme physical pain and resultant loss of mental function, Zeman's friends and family were deeply skeptical of ECT. While his mood briefly improved after the initial session, he soon entered the period of madness to which the book's title refers. The author provides firsthand observations and original insights about clinical depression and its treatments, the well-documented link between creativity and mental illness and the powerlessness of friends and relatives in the face of this type of suffering. Zeman is a first-rate storyteller with a vast and glittering array of anecdotes from which to draw. He is also a narcissistic man-child whose fawning self-descriptions and the gorgeous women he loved and left may try readers’ patience. There's a fine line between employing irony for humorous effect and boasting, and Zeman often lands on the wrong side of it. As he does with his closest friends, he draws readers in with fresh, well-crafted tales of terror, anguish and occasional triumph, then drives them away again with arrogance, evasiveness and self-absorption.
Despite a rushed ending and a difficult narrator, the book is an exact, revealing and intermittently moving portrait of a talented but struggling artist.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-592-40598-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
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
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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