Circuitous stories of how advisers and role models have influenced and supported the changes in one man’s messy life.
The actor/comedian and former drug addict explains how mentors have helped him change his life.
Sex, drugs, fame, power—these are just some of the things Brand (Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions, 2017, etc.) has been addicted to in his lifetime. In this meandering narrative, the author shares stories of who he was and how he changed via the help of various mentors at different stages in his life. Chip, himself a former drug addict, helped Brand get off drugs by showing him he needed to be honest, willing, and open-minded about life. He taught the author “that it is okay to talk about your feelings, more than okay, mandatory,” including feeling “vulnerable, inadequate, fearful and angry.” Meredith, an acupuncturist, took on the role of mother, nurturing Brand through the difficult details of his divorce. Jimmy identified Brand’s codependent relationships and helped him move beyond them, forcing him to re-evaluate what he took and what he provided in each of them. Each of the author’s mentors has assisted in his transformation from an angry, disillusioned person to the more well-rounded father and spiritual person he is today. “All of us live on a canyon wire between the person we used to be, the person we are ascending and the person we are aspiring to become,” writes the author. “Every day the pugilistic slog goes on for me….I’m back and forth between the kind and ideal me…and the ‘Venom’ version of myself, all fangs and inner eelish sinew, writhing.” After readers meet each of his guides, they will clearly understand how they have helped Brand, but it is debatable whether this knowledge, delivered in a rambling way throughout the text, will be enough to get readers to look for mentors of their own.
Circuitous stories of how advisers and role models have influenced and supported the changes in one man’s messy life.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-22627-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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