A HOLE IN THE WORLD: An American Boyhood

by Richard Rhodes ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1990

Another stunning work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Rhodes--this one an account of his personal triumph over a childhood of deprivation and abuse. ""When I was thirteen months old, my mother killed herself,"" Rhodes begins. Too young to comprehend her suicide, Rhodes nevertheless became aware of a yawning emptiness that he later described as a ""hole in the world."" Rhodes and his brother, Stanley, spent the next nine years in a series of Kansas City boardinghouses with their father until he remarried and the brothers' world was shattered again. Their new stepmother so passionately resented the boys' presence that she begrudged their every bite of food, made them sleep in a concrete storeroom behind their apartment, and barred them from the house until dark. Rhodes and his brother spent their days rummaging through trash cans for food, loitering in shops to escape the winter's cold, and wandering the underground sewer pipes to kill time until they were allowed back inside the house. Half-starved, adrift, and a fanatic devotee of heroic comic books and science fiction, Rhodes was at last placed in the Andrew Drumm Institute, where neglected boys raised their own crops, butchered their own livestock, and were encouraged to take responsibility for their lives. Thirty years have passed since Rhodes escaped Missouri via a scholarship to Yale. Yet only after having indulged his fascination with the ultimate ""hole in the world"" (The Making of the Atomci Bomb, 1986), and revisited the environment in which he came of age (Farm), is he able to confront, in this intimate, scrupulously honest account, the irretrievable loss of his childhood. ""I was saving the story for fiction,"" Rhodes confesses, ""a red giant set somewhere neat' the end of the world, something Wagnerian."" It is a tribute to his unerring instincts as a writer that this ""a cappella"" nonfiction version proves so much more terrifying and transformative.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1990

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1990

Categories: NONFICTION