A performer and playwright looks back on her dysfunctional adolescence and her decision to run away from home.
Living in a small town with her unsupportive mother, stepfather, siblings, and stepsiblings was just not working for Marquardt, so, at the age of 16, while her mother was out of the house, she packed her bags, called a cab, and left. This was the start of two tumultuous years during which she lived on the couches of friends, shared bedrooms with others, and lived part of the time with her father. She continued to attend school and to write whenever she could, a habit that projected her into the acting and writing world, while also smoking cigarettes obsessively and getting blackout drunk whenever possible. She entered the goth scene in Vancouver and hung out at bars and dance clubs, where she was exposed to the seedier side of life; S&M was common in the basement hangout she frequented with her group of loyal friends. Marquardt’s tale is gritty and sordid, full of vivid details that make palpable the experiences of a teenage girl searching for her place in the world. She spares little as she describes the physical and verbal abuse she endured and the fear, anger, and confusion caused by her family and others. “I loved to write, and Mom’s rejection of such a raw and exposed part of me was worse that if she’d slapped me,” writes the author, “and like a fuel to a fire, it caused a rage that burned inside my belly….[W]hen confronted with a need that contradicted hers, or with emotional turmoil that she couldn’t control, she shut off.” Marquardt also skillfully communicates her desires and dreams as she approached adulthood.
The highly expressive narrative is often brutal and raw, a combination of truth and penance, and it feels like a confession leading toward sanity and forgiveness.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-4916-4
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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