A poignant and heartfelt mix of sociology and memoir.
A Bustle entertainment editor examines the lives and deaths of three young women who were also products of therapeutic boarding schools.
Rhode Island native Leach met Elissa—who would eventually befriend two girls named Alyssa and Alissa—when both were infants. Raised by suburban “parents with means and access,” all four girls experimented with drinking and drugs, “rebellious behaviors that were of the socially acceptable, suburban variety—until they became something greater, more fearful.” Leach would be the only one who reached age 26. Drawing on her memories and interviews with countless people involved in the girls’ lives, Leach subsumed her grief into a quest to understand how she had managed to survive what the other girls did not. Like Elissa, the author fell under the spell of media stars like Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie, whose “rehab stints, public meltdowns, breakups and hookups” transformed them into icons of cool and, more insidiously, into models of the disordered behavior that plagued the Elissas. As a teen, the author, shy around boys, “delved in the booze,” while Alyssa flaunted her sexuality and fell in love with a boy who introduced her to heroin. In high school, Leach chose to express rebellion through hipster bohemianism, and the more stubbornly defiant Elissa was sent to therapeutic boarding schools. At one of them—Ponca Pines—Elissa met Alyssa and Alissa, two hard-living girls with whom she formed the troubled triumvirate that fascinated Leach to the point of obsession. The author refrains from indicting either Ponca Pines or the “Troubled Teen Industry” for the girls’ deaths, which happened after they left. Instead, she develops sensitive portraits of each girl and suggests how social pressures, combined with health and environmental factors, conspired to damage the minds and then destroy the bodies of three vulnerable young women.
A poignant and heartfelt mix of sociology and memoir.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9780306826917
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Legacy Lit/Hachette
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
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