A moving, hopeful book, but one that occasionally feels more like a therapeutic exercise than a complete work.
In this debut memoir, a child abuse survivor recounts how she coped with the flood of intrusive memories that forced her to relive her painful past.
Buchhammer was a happily married young mother when disturbing memories began invading her thoughts. The first was of her stepfather Holger—a high-ranking officer in the East German military—crushing the head of a kitten and warning her, “This is what I will do to you if you tell anyone our secret.” More vivid and upsetting recollections soon followed, forcing Astrid to revisit the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of Holger and other pedophiles. Her mother, herself a victim of Holger’s violence, was unable to stop the abuse, and the authority figures she turned to for help betrayed her. Decades later, flashbacks to these events left her virtually incapacitated. Only with the help of a patient, understanding therapist and her supportive husband, Thomas, was Buchhammer able to begin to live again. Drawing on unvarnished memories and using simple, direct language, she shows the ways abusers use power to control their victims, as well as how a community that looks the other way can allow abuse to continue. She doesn’t hesitate to share the most graphic details of her experiences, and many may find these brutal passages difficult to get through. However, the barrage of horrors is mitigated by the alternation of chapters set in the past (which offer a fascinating window into East German life in the 1970s and ’80s) with those set in the present. The primary focus throughout is naturally on Buchhammer, particularly the heartbreaking isolation and fear she experienced as a child. Except for Holger, the other characters remain ciphers. Buchhammer offers few theories about her mother’s relationship with Holger or why she endured the years of torment at his hands. The years between Buchhammer’s decision to leave home as a teen and her life nearly two decades later are also frustratingly blank. The central theme is instead her successful and inspiring refusal to let her horrifying childhood destroy her present happiness.
A moving, hopeful book, but one that occasionally feels more like a therapeutic exercise than a complete work.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0692332849
Page Count: 292
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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