A sharp, insightful, and stirring memoir.
A radio journalist and former This American Life producer recounts how she healed from complex PTSD.
In her early 20s, Foo began seeing a therapist to discuss her boyfriend and other problems. But it was only after she left California and turned 30 that the therapist diagnosed her with complex PTSD, explaining that “sufferers of complex PTSD have undergone continual abuse—trauma that has occurred over a long period of time, over the course of years.” Using her investigative journalism skills, Foo began probing her troubled past. She remembered her unhappy mother’s violence and how she later became her father’s adolescent “caretaker” after her mother left. By high school, family dysfunction had transformed her into “a tiny, foul-mouthed pirate” who could not keep friends. Foo’s research into trauma and the brain later led to the conclusion that she had become “trapped within [a destructive] loop of stimulus, response.” She quit her stressful job at This American Life to interview neuroscientists and psychologists, practice yin yoga, join a childhood trauma support group, try experimental therapies, and care for the endometriosis she realized may have been a bodily reaction to years of living with C-PTSD. Foo then returned to her childhood home in San Jose to “fact-check my abuse.” In the course of interviewing old acquaintances, she realized how trauma had turned her otherwise beautiful hometown into a place she could only remember as “a place of hurt.” Ultimately, it was a stable, supportive connection to her new boyfriend and his loving parents that led her to final acceptance of how abuse and self-hatred had warped her mind, heart, and body. As Foo sheds necessary light on the little-discussed topic of C-PTSD, she holds out the hope that while “healing is never final…along with the losses are the triumphs” that can positively transform a traumatized life.
A sharp, insightful, and stirring memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-23810-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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
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