A well-written memoir that offers lessons on understanding and forgiving oneself.
A debut memoir and guidebook to help readers move beyond personal trauma toward self-acceptance.
Correa grew up in a dysfunctional family. When drunk, her father physically abused her and made lewd comments about her developing body. When sober, he resumed the role of supportive parent. Correa’s mother endured the same mercurial personality and abuse, but she blamed rather than rallied or helped her daughter. At 14, “I was the common denominator,” Correa says, shouldering shame and responsibility for her father’s actions. Believing she was unloved and unworthy, Correa developed ways to hide from current and future pain. In the memoir chapters of her book, she visualizes these protective mechanisms as separate people, embodied elements of her personality. She enters an imaginary conference room and welcomes rebellious Nanette, compulsively busy Superwoman, purposefully overweight Dolly and many other forms of her young self. Devoting roughly one chapter to each persona, Correa revisits her childhood to understand how she created these “bad” traits to compensate for a lack of parental affection and guidance. For readers who have experienced similar abuse, Correa’s story of self-hatred and fractured personality likely rings true. Her vivid, honest writing renders the characters and the events surrounding their creation believable. Through this visualization, Correa moves toward self-forgiveness—embodied as Francesca, which means free. In some chapters, however, this change comes too quickly. Prison Guard, for example, maintained the rules in Correa’s life and forced to her follow stringent diets leading to lifelong eating disorders. After Correa visualizes Prison Guard and recognizes her need for obsessive control, that element of her personality kicks off her boots, lets down her hair, and transforms into the positive Motivator. In the two final chapters, which read more as a guidebook, Correa wisely acknowledges that self-directed visualization may not be sufficient for deep “emotional wounds” and refers readers to professionals. Despite this caveat, Correa’s personal story, step-by-step process and extensive list of protective personality traits may offer solace and direction to readers wishing to shed traumatic memories and a negative self-image.
A well-written memoir that offers lessons on understanding and forgiving oneself.Pub Date: July 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1940847672
Page Count: 134
Publisher: Vervante
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2014
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 Yorkerstaff 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
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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