Pedestrian epiphanies like these suggest that, while Cheney may have conquered mental illness, she hasn’t yet overcome the...
An attorney writes about her decades-long struggle with manic depression.
It would be easier to feel sorry about the degradations, depressions and rejections Cheney has endured if she didn’t spend so much time making sure that we also know how hot she is. She was a high-school varsity cheerleader, has spectacular red hair (all hers—no highlights), attracts males like moths and elicits catty comments from jealous women. She can steal your boyfriend—and will, even if you’re her best friend—and out-rev you at the stoplight with her Porsche. (She got a vintage Corvette for her Sweet 16; one boyfriend drove a Lamborghini.) She graduated with honors from Vassar College, where during one of her bad periods she prowled late-night dorm corridors and ate from garbage cans. After law school, she quickly landed a prestigious job with an L.A. firm specializing in celebrity cases. For years she deceived her employers about her addiction to various prescription drugs. For years she practiced the yo-yo diet, binging and purging. She had a dozen electroshock treatments. She tried to kill herself in a variety of ways. Again, we’d feel worse for Cheney if her tortured accounts of fate’s blows weren’t accompanied by a parade of attractive men who find her irresistible, except for that darn mental illness of hers. The book is almost more embarrassing when she tries to tell us What She Has Learned. A Masai girl covered in sores who can nonetheless smile and a horribly disfigured woman whom Cheney comforts by stroking her beautiful blonde hair appear to exist solely to demonstrate the author’s ability to see that others are actually worse off than she is.
Pedestrian epiphanies like these suggest that, while Cheney may have conquered mental illness, she hasn’t yet overcome the solipsism manifest on every page of her boundlessly self-absorbed memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-143023-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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