An honest, moving and inspirational memoir of recovery.
A debut memoir about one woman’s recovery from rape.
Returning home on a sunny day to her fifth-floor New York City walk-up, 24-year-old Warner glimpsed a man standing in the hallway. Ignoring a faint intuition of warning, she opened her apartment door and the man dragged her inside by her neck and raped her at knife point on her roommate’s bed. After her assailant fled, Warner, in a haze of shock and surrealistic disbelief, called 911 and a few close friends. She had difficulty wrapping her head around her experience; instead, her mind played a summary of events on a constant loop: “There was that moment on the stairs. A confused feeling as I was swept up by the neck. I screamed. Then there was no more breath.” Warner told her story to detectives, emergency room nurses and others, each time asking, “What did I do wrong?” Although people constantly tried to reassure her, she remained unconvinced. She writes of how she later felt intensely alienated from her friends and tried to find solace in her parents; however, she couldn’t connect with her emotionally unavailable father and chose to keep her traumatic secret from her overly cautious mother. In clear, vivid detail, and in nearly poetic moments of prose (“I walked around with my senses barely inhabiting my own body”), Warner recounts the year after her ordeal, affectingly relating the uncontrollable anger and overwhelming feeling of hopelessness that consumed her as she tried to come to terms with her trauma. She perfectly exemplifies the daily challenges she faced, including the loss of her self-image and her frustration regarding her inability to identify her attacker during a lineup and subsequent trial. She finally found relief and peace through group therapy. Although her story is heartbreaking, Warner’s courageous tale of recovery will likely serve as a guiding light to those who’ve had similar, life-altering experiences.
An honest, moving and inspirational memoir of recovery.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-1489557827
Page Count: 350
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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