An emotionally fraught tale of a mother’s love and her actions to save her daughter from opioid addiction.
Another heartbreaking tale of opioid abuse and the toll it takes on an entire family.
Missing money, bent and burned or missing spoons, and missing jewelry: All of these served as clues that eventually led Cavanagh to the realization that her daughter, Katie, was a heroin addict who had stolen from her in order to buy drugs. The author’s grief and suffering are consistently palpable as she traces the numerous paths she took with her ex-husband, Mike, over the course of several years, to get Katie into treatment centers. She shares the anguish and dismay she felt each time her daughter slipped away again, returning to her life of drug abuse and abusive boyfriends. “I’ve seen so much pain in the last few years,” she writes. “I hadn’t known just how much pain the world could contain. It crushes me sometimes, not just my own but the pain of so many others also trying to hang on to whatever shred of their loved ones they can. I don’t know how I got here. There is never a day that goes by that this does not feel very surreal.” Cavanagh describes her powerful feelings of both fear and shame and how her need for support led her to reach out to others experiencing the same trauma. Because of her deep involvement in this crisis and her discovery that help was limited, the author founded a nonprofit group, Magnolia New Beginnings, to aid parents and drug users in finding treatment and the necessary emotional support for those struggling with all kinds of substance abuse. While Cavanagh’s story is unique, it’s also, sadly, fairly common. When she discovered the shockingly widespread nature of the problem, the author devoted herself to addressing the crisis—and its attendant stigmas—head-on.
An emotionally fraught tale of a mother’s love and her actions to save her daughter from opioid addiction.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-29734-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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