A unique account of a man who aimed to change his life by understanding and altering his own behavior.
A man examines his own atypical mind in this debut memoir.
Gibson became ill one day at his contracting job, which led him to days of introspection, culminating in several revelations about his toward the people in his life. In this book, he relates his autobiography, interspersed with scenes from the process that led to the work’s creation. He recounts a difficult childhood, an unruly adolescence and a turbulent marriage. There are indications of something unusual about the way he experiences and interacts with the world. For example, he became so frustrated with school that he chose to leave shortly before his 16th birthday; later, as an adult, he wrecked several company-provided cars due to his dangerous behavior on the road. Interpersonal difficulties also plagued him; for example, he writes of his first wife’s miscarriage: “I really couldn’t fathom what the big deal was and assured Julie that she was bound to get pregnant again, so what did it matter?” His wife later bore him a daughter, but by the time Gibson began to reassess his life, he was divorced and his daughter was a teenager. His live-in partner, an understanding woman, eventually persuaded him to read online articles about bipolar disorder and associated illnesses; after initially resisting the idea, Gibson found himself fascinated. He finally concluded that he had to work to make his brain function more efficiently without mental health treatment—a decision that led him to write this memoir. He spends the remainder of the book detailing his theories and discussing how they helped him change his life. Much of his supporting data, however, is scattershot, based largely on his own personal experience and popular science. Readers may wish to treat his prescriptions cautiously—as a case study of what one man found helpful, rather than actionable advice for anyone living with mental illness. That said, this book may attract readers interested in works about psychology.
A unique account of a man who aimed to change his life by understanding and altering his own behavior.Pub Date: June 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481796439
Page Count: 248
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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