relegated to the "recovery" shelf, and that's too bad

books:


	• The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life Robert Goolrick Algonquin Books, 2007 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 25 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Choppy, too detached.

This book had a lot of potential to be a respectable read. The stories of depression, abuse, alcoholism are all very compelling, but they are all told in an extremely detached tone that you can't quite figure out if it's real or fiction. In some parts the words are poetic and very expressive, especially in the last two chapters - but overall, the book doesn't quite hold.

The horrendous events in the narrator's life stem from being sexually abused by his father, but we don't learn of this abuse until the last pages of the book. The narrator follows no chronology in this book, but jumps from topic to topic indiscriminately. On page 33, the author commits one of the worst crimes in literature - writing a sentence that spans 49 lines with no period. Could the book have skipped editing?

The book had a lot of potential, but it was too botched in many areas. It's choppy and the author (in many parts of the book) is too detached from the events in his life. There's a fair amount of good humor in the book, but some of it comes at inappropriate times - which only adds to that dreary sense of detachment.

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The sadest book!

I had heard the author on the radio and really liked his voice and the way he answered the interviewers' questions. I started to read the book at 9 am on one morning and was done at noon. Not even once did I stop reading. He wrote with a great style, you felt that you just wanted to get into the story, hug him and cry with him and tell him that everything will be O.K. I did not even have time to cry while reading. The shock of his misery was just too big. After each of the incidents i kept thinking: O.K., now that was the worst, right?
Very good book.

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relegated to the "recovery" shelf, and that's too bad

The writing in this book deserves the widest audience possible; the subject matter is painful, difficult, but the author's skill with the language is as redemptive as the story itself.

How not to raise a child

There is no doubt that the author is a creative and lyrical writer, but the emotions conveyed herein are so much more compelling and vivid because they are real. It is a must read for any parent who has anxiety about their own self-doubt in raising children. The book evokes the mixed raw emotions of a child who wants to love and be loved by his parents (and others), but is incapable of emulating feelings that have never been received. At times, the run-on-sentence rush of scattered thought can be spellbinding and alternately monotonous, but the story is a page turner despite the raw thought to paper style. Although I found the book heartbreaking, I also found the self-loathing horrifying at times. This is a quick read.

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I was amazed

at Mr. Goolrick's ability to express desperate feelings I would have thought impossible to describe...

at the way his family was ready to blame him and never ever mentioned what happened to him...

at the sick behavior of his father...

at the amount of medication the author is (was?) taking...

I sincerely hope that writing this excellent memoir was a healing experience.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

It was the 1950s, a time of calm, a time when all things were new and everything seemd possible. A few years before, a noble war had been won, and now life had returned to normal.

For one little boy, however, life had become anything but "normal."

To all appearances, he and his family lived an almost idyllic life. The father was a respected professor, the mother a witty and elegant lady, someone everyone loved. They were parents to three bright, smiling children: two boys and a girl. They lived on a sunny street in a small college town nestled neatly in a leafy valley. They gave parties, hosted picnics, went to church?just like their neighbors. To all appearances, their life seemed ideal. But it was, in fact, all appearances.

Lineage, tradition, making the right impression?these were matters of great importance, especially to the mother. But behind the facade this family had created lurked secrets so dark, so painful for this one little boy, that his life would never be the same.

It is through the eyes of that boy?a grown man now, revisiting that time?that we see this seemingly serene world and watch as it slowly comes completely and irrevocably undone.

Beautifully written, often humorous, sometimes sweet, ultimately shocking, this is a son's story of looking back with both love and anger at the parents who gave him life and then robbed him of it, who created his world and then destroyed it.

As author Lee Smith, who knew this world and this family, observed, "Alcohol may be the real villain in this pain-permeated, exquisitely written memoir of childhood?but it is also filled with absolutely dead-on social commentary of this very particular time and place. A brave, haunting, riveting book."

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