A sometimes-revealing but blandly written remembrance.
Psychoanalyst Williams’ (Demystifying Meaningful Coincidences [Synchronicities], 2015, etc.) recalls his time treating heroin addicts at a controversial New York City facility in this memoir, written with author and journalist Samberg (Some Kind of Lonely Clown, 2016, etc.).
In 1967, Williams, a “novice psychotherapist,” was offered a job at Odyssey House, a well-known heroin addiction research and treatment center on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The facility had recently been founded by Judianne Densen-Gerber, a highly driven psychiatrist. Six months after starting work, however, Williams says that he began to doubt Densen-Gerber’s methods and decided to keep a journal, whose entries form the basis of this memoir. Williams focuses on what he calls “Dr. Judi’s wild idea” of 24-hour group-therapy sessions, in which staff and residents came together to “dig for deeper truths.” Williams also asserts that Densen-Gerber had “rigid and authoritarian tendencies.” He attempts to understand why he was “mesmerized” by his enigmatic boss by describing his own upbringing and considering how he felt that the Odyssey House founder, who died in 2003, had “assumed the mantle” of his father in his life. The memoir’s co-author and editor, Samberg, conducted interviews with Williams to add “important details not recorded in the journal.” The authors mention that “at least half of the block on which Odyssey House was located could be described as urban squalor,” but readers who might be interested in what everyday life was actually like inside Odyssey House will be disappointed by the book’s lack of visual description. Instead, it often feels akin to an academic paper, with a delivery that will prove unpalatably dry for some: “Although mild punishments were sometimes necessary, they were never dispensed before careful evaluation of their potential for efficacy or futility.” The memoir does allude to specific residents by first name, such as Tyrone, but their stories have the manner of impersonal case studies. Overall, this book will prove useful to those interested in the methodologies adopted by Odyssey House. However, its sterile storytelling approach will deter casual readers.
A sometimes-revealing but blandly written remembrance.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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 Yorkerstaff 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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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