A confused and overstuffed tale of psychological illness and recovery.
A young man’s traumatic failures in love drive him to madness in this debut book.
As a child, Tom was a favorite target of bullies—fearful and submissive, as well as set apart by social awkwardness. It didn’t help that his parents had a wildly tumultuous relationship that ended in an acrimonious divorce, or that his older sister dismissively rejected him in favor of her cooler friends. And like any adolescent boy, Tom is drawn romantically to his co-ed contemporaries but also chronically spurned, leaving him “maladjusted, alienated, lonely, depressed, and suffering from low self-esteem.” He attends the University of Maine and falls in love with Lisa, but she doesn’t return his affections, and clearly only keeps him around to cruelly bolster her own sense of self-worth. Now dejected from a lack of social success, he opts to spend the summer with his aunt and uncle in Arizona; there he meets another girl—Mary—and falls madly in love with her. When she too fails to reciprocate his affections, he starts to lose his grip on reality, battered from yet another bout of rejection, and eventually seeks the counsel of anyone willing to help—his professor, a therapist, and a hypnotist are among those to whom he turns. Tom overdoses on anti-psychotic medication and lands in a psychiatric institution, grappling with his festering obsession over a girl he hardly dated and barely knew. Doran intends this to be a thinly fictionalized memoir written in the third person of his own scramble for mental peace. The descriptions of Tom’s afflictions are insistently clinical—the book begins and ends with notes from the author’s former therapist, explaining, in the driest academic language imaginable, the psychological import of the story. Doran also repeatedly describes Tom’s plight in diagnostic language, apparently anxious that readers might draw their own conclusions. In addition, the prose at times hyperventilates. For example, Tom anguishes over a girl’s attention: “She is gazing at me. The angel is gazing at me. She’s gazing. Gazing! She’s gazing at me. What does it mean? What could it mean? Do I dare hope?” Of course, Tom’s (and the author’s) victory over mental illness remains unfathomably inspiring, but there’s more to readable fiction than inspiration.
A confused and overstuffed tale of psychological illness and recovery.Pub Date: May 7, 2012
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 527
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2017
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
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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