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WAXING PATHETIC

An original, wonderfully readable feminist remembrance.

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Clark (Stripping Down to the Bones, 2013) recounts her life’s indignities in a self-deprecating memoir.

“Pathetic” would probably not be the first term that most people would use to describe their own lives. “I like the word,” Clark writes in her introduction. “It’s not sad, it’s more like pitiful. It kind of wallows around and whines a lot, even though the whining is probably justified. It also connotes a certain obsessive cyclical pattern.” In this memoir, she includes some diary entries and essays that she wrote during her teenage years, which document her first crushes; her ambitions at 12 years old, which included, “I’d like to be a person everyone would like”; and dates. She attempts to explain her later lack of success at romance, discussing, for example, how she misunderstood certain sexual terms and made unfortunate choices in men. She tells of three different cancer scares, which included a hysterectomy, and how they affected her self-image, quality of life, and plans for the future. She also writes about why she decided to become an exotic dancer—“the Thinking Man’s Stripper”—and how that work shaped her ideas about her own sexuality, feminist identity, and American society. Clark’s prose is frenetic and engaging, combining self-referentiality, humor, deconstructionist tendencies, and even a bit of friendly antagonism toward readers: “Some people complain that my transitions are abrupt, and I jump from one episode, time frame, or topic to another, but I am merely subverting expectations and avoiding predictability, to ensure the reader that no algorithm wrote this stuff.” The narrative is largely free from the constraints of traditional structure, which only adds to the sense that the reader is inhabiting the author’s mind. Clark is insightful and funny and seems to always have a new, more surprising anecdote to share—all while tying her experiences into the larger framework of being a woman in contemporary American society. What the book occasionally lacks in polish it makes up for in raw exuberance and hard-won wisdom.

An original, wonderfully readable feminist remembrance.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 207

Publisher: Kurti Publishing

Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

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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NIGHT

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. 

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.

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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