bookshelf

AN ABBREVIATED LIFE

Name: AN ABBREVIATED LIFE
Author: Ariel Leve
ISBN: 978-0-06-226945-4

by Ariel Leve ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 14, 2016

A candid rendering of pain and survival.

bookshelf

A daughter’s raw memoir exposes her “spiteful, vindictive, uncontrollable mother.”

Journalist Leve (It Could Be Worse, You Could Be Me, 2010, etc.), a former columnist for the London Sunday Times Magazine and contributor to other journals, grew up in a Manhattan penthouse with her mother, a poet whose narcissism, unpredictable mood swings, and physical abuse the author recounts in repetitive detail. At times “slapped, punched, kicked, pinched, and attacked,” subjected to hysterical tirades alternating with suffocating demonstrations of love, Leve felt abandoned, betrayed, and continually threatened, as if she were stranded “in the pit of a crevasse, with a rope to safety just inches away and out of reach.” Some measure of safety came during visits to her adored father, who lived in Thailand and whom Leve portrays as flawless; from her father’s former girlfriend, whose nurturing attention brought a bit of stability to Leve’s life in New York; and from a succession of caretakers, many of whom fled from her mother’s employ. One woman quit or was fired multiple times over the course of 12 years. By her mid-40s, Leve still felt indelibly wounded and oppressed by the past. “You understand these things and you’re in control of your life,” her father remarks. “Why can’t you beat those demons and destroy them?” Overcoming the demons, however, proved complicated: Leve learned that childhood stress and abuse caused "pathological changes to brain chemistry,” making her “hypervigilant” and “highly reactive to perceived threats.” Desperate for help, she decided to undergo eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy, designed to treat PTSD. Two years later, she was living with her Italian lover and his daughters in Bali, finally feeling central to a family. Though still beset by memories, she was also buoyed by “endorphins of hope” that she finally would be able to “outrace the past.”

A candid rendering of pain and survival.

Pub Date: June 14, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-06-226945-4

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: March 26, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
1963
by Robin Morgan Ariel Leve

- BOOK REVIEW
IT COULD BE WORSE, YOU COULD BE ME
by Ariel Leve

bookshelf

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

bookshelf

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

bookshelf

NIGHT

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...

bookshelf

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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.