A thorough, intimate retelling of a tragic tale.
Memoir of a rape victim's quest for justice 22 years after her attack.
On Sept. 8, 2005, Seccuro received a letter that forever altered her future. It was from William Beebe, a former fraternity member at the University of Virginia who had brutally raped the author and was never charged with the crime. His unexpected apology spurred Seccuro to find answers, and in the months that followed, she and Beebe exchanged several heated e-mails in which she attempted to make sense of the hazy night of her attack. As she soon discovered, Beebe's recollections of the rape contradicted her own. When she decided to press charges, the trial that followed revealed secrets buried far deeper than she had imagined. “I was a straight-A student, played the lead in many school plays, and was a member of the student council, swim team, math club, yearbook staff, and cheerleading squad,” writes the author. Yet following that night in 1984, all of her credentials became irrelevant. She was transformed into a rape victim, and as she reached out to her university for help, she found few willing to listen. Seccuro’s account of the 2006 trial serves as a final chance for redemption. While Beebe readily admitted his involvement in the rape, his own guilt was soon overshadowed by the revelation that he was the third of three men who raped Seccuro that night—a fact that shocked even the victim. The trial also took a toll on her marriage. The memoir continually shifts between conjuring the ghosts of the past and combating the ghosts of the present. The author’s unrelenting search for the truth opens old wounds, forcing her to relive the most traumatic night of her life in order to seek long-overdue justice.
A thorough, intimate retelling of a tragic tale.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59691-585-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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