Scant wonder that Denzel Washington seized on Finding Fish as source material for his forthcoming directorial debut: Antwone Fisher's autobiography is full of the sort of grueling emotional assault-and-battery and too-good-to-be-true personal redemption that wins Oscars nine years out of ten. Two months before Fisher was born, his father was shot to death by an abused ex-lover as he tried to batter down her door. Fisher's underage single mother surrendered him to Ohio's foster-care system, which handed him off to a woman who subjected him to nonstop physical and psychological abuse. For more than a decade, Fisher and his fellow wards were beaten, tied to poles in a dark basement for hours on end, encouraged to fight amongst themselves, and subjected to endless dehumanizing mind games. When he was 16, his foster mother threw him out of her house, leaving him homeless, without prospects, and so beaten down that even in writing his life story, he evinces more vague bewilderment than anger on his own behalf. Fisher finally joined the Navy, got an education, traveled the world, reunited with his extended family, and became a security guard in Hollywood, where, once word of his agonizing past began to spread, producers lined up to offer him film contracts. Oscars aside, this sort of emotional-rags-to-emotional-riches story is frequently the stuff of great literature; Charles Dickens, no stranger to orphanages or long-delayed family reunions, would have had a field day with it. But Finding Fish is often unsatisfying, largely because of its detachment. The book opens on a sentimental note, as Fisher conflates oral family histories into a colorful re-imagining of the circumstances of his father's death. It closes on an even more sentimental note, singing paeans of praise to Fisher's wife and child. But in between, Fisher falls back on dry reportage, approaching his horrific childhood with an air of abstracted fatalism, which mixes poorly with the air of abstracted superiority he uses to address his adult life. Both flavors of abstraction often place him as far outside the action as the caseworkers who fail to piece together the clues that might have exposed his abusive foster mother. Excerpts from those caseworkers' files, scattered throughout Finding Fish, constitute the book's most interesting element, graphically illustrating the vast gap between the internalized world of experience and the externalized world of the observer. But Fisher himself has trouble crossing that gap.