This lyrical debut memoir reveals the indelible consequences of childhood abuse.
Poet and essayist Chin was raised in an atmosphere of violence. Her depressed, angry mother rejected her, and her father savagely beat her. “For as long as I can remember,” writes the author, “I knew that my parents were out of control. I knew they were capable of anything.” At the age of 11, she started running away from home; by the time she was 14, she was in jail. She spent the next years living in state-run institutions or on the streets, sleeping in stairwells “or, more often, the questionable beds of men and women.” Chin became a stripper, abused drugs and sold herself for sex. Addicted to cocaine, she realized that she had hit bottom. Drawing on a spark of inner strength, she managed to wrest control of her life, earning a GED, taking college courses and eventually completing an MFA degree. Then, in her mid-30s, married to a neurosurgeon, just having moved into their first home, she became overwhelmed with panic attacks. She was afraid to climb stairs, leave her house and drive on highways. Desperate, she sought help from an array of medical professionals, with varying success. Finally, she found a measure of peace from riding horses, particularly one skittish horse whose reaction to the world mirrored her own. Cantering, she discovered, felt “like the opposite of panic…it was only by holding on so tightly that I could begin learning how to get go.” She discovered, too, that panic “wasn’t a virus or an erratic black bird…in the end, panic was me.” Although she could not escape her past, it need not dominate the present: “No matter how many stories you put on top of the first story, the first one is always there, visible.”
Chin deftly creates the palimpsest of those stories, past and present, in this candid, graceful testimony to remarkable resilience.Pub Date: June 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3486-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | NATURE | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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