by Zoe Niklas Janice Harper ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
A memoir about overcoming abuse and finding a true definition of family that’s uplifting, upsetting, and repetitive by turns.
A deathbed confrontation frames Niklas’ account of a fraught relationship with her troubled, abusive mother.
The author’s biological mother, Zodie Victor, faced death at the age of 52 after years of hard living. Gale, Zodie’s eldest daughter, and the author, her youngest, gathered at her bedside in the hospital. Niklas tells of deciding to finally confront her mother and then recounts what she says were years of instability and abuse at her parent’s hands. She narrates her troubled childhood, which she portrays as terrifying and complex due to her mother’s multiple failed relationships, violent mood swings, and addictions to alcohol and prescription drugs. Her parent’s issues, she says, endangered her and her sister on multiple occasions. Specifically, the author writes that one of her mom’s husbands molested her, and another frequently got into physical and verbal altercations with her mother. After the teenage Gale managed to leave the family, Niklas was left to fend for herself and serve as her mother’s caretaker. When Niklas was finally sent by the state to live with her best friend’s family, it led to a tug of war between her mother and the Dimocks for Niklas’ love and attention. While her mother attempted to bribe Niklas with pets, clothing, and trips to the movies, the Dimocks showed her simple love and care, allowing her to have a true childhood. The author spent years torn between her loyalty to her biological mother and her intense desire for a “normal” existence. As she grew into the adult that stood at her mother’s bedside, she also learned how to stand up for herself and determine her own needs. Niklas’ account of her experiences is often intense and occasionally poetic, such as when she compares herself to an embryonic chick and expresses a desire to develop before she’s “cracked” like an egg. She returns to certain ideas so often they become mantras, including her preoccupation with being a “good girl” and her frequent meditations on her mother’s favorite phrase, “blood is thicker than water.” Such belabored phrases, as well as the somewhat clunky philosophizing at the memoir’s end, detract from the overall reading experience. However, they don’t take away from Niklas’ message of strength and resilience.
A memoir about overcoming abuse and finding a true definition of family that’s uplifting, upsetting, and repetitive by turns.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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 Yorker staff 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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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