A penetrating work of family history and self-reflection.
In this memoir, a retired psychotherapist attempts to untangle a relative’s personal life as a way of understanding her own.
Cox first heard the story of her great-grandmother Elizabeth from her parents when she first got married—how the woman had borne two children out of wedlock and how no one, even their descendants, knew who the children’s fathers were. The story held a special significance for Cox, both because she shared her great-grandmother’s first name—Elizabeth—and because the author had gotten pregnant with her first child when she was an unmarried teenager. It was not until 2004, four decades later,in the aftermath of her marriage’s dissolution, a disastrous love affair, and a severe depressive episode, that Cox decided to try to find out the truth of her great-grandmother’s life: “I have a strong feeling that there is something in it I need to discover….In order to find myself today, I need to know where I have come from, who my ancestors were and what that means for me.” The retired author set about to understand the life of that other, earlier Elizabeth through research and travel; while doing so, she began to unpack her own difficult adolescence, which was further complicated by fears brought on by her parents’ poor health. Cox, a psychotherapist, uses her expertise to delve into her own psychology as well as that of her great-grandmother. Here, for instance, she speculates on how Elizabeth’s experience with her own father (an ill man, like Cox’s own) affected her: “Did Elizabeth shoulder more of the burden than a twelve-year-old girl should have to?...Children did work in the mills at a very young age and there would be no money coming in if William couldn’t work.” Overall, the author manages to excavate quite a bit from the historical record, filling in gaps with a novelist’s sense of narrative. Although there are no real groundbreaking revelations here, she manages to say quite a bit about the complicated dynamics of families—many of which seem to repeat themselves generation after generation.
A penetrating work of family history and self-reflection.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-78864-933-9
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Cinnamon Press
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The stormy career of a top Navy SEAL hotspur. Commander Marcinko, USN Ret., recently served time at Petersburg Federal Prison for conspiracy to defraud the Navy by overcharging for specialized equipment—the result, he says, of telling off too many admirals. It seems that his ornery and joyous aggression, nurtured by a Czech grandfather in a flinty Pennsylvania mining town, has brought him to grief in peace and to brilliance in war. Serving his first tour in Vietnam in 1966 as an enlisted SEAL expert in underwater demolition, Marcinko returned for a second tour as an officer leading a commando squad he had trained. Here, his accounts of riverine warfare—creeping underwater to Vietcong boats and slipping over their gunwales; raiding VC island strongholds in the South China Sea; steaming up to the Cambodian border to tempt the VC across and being overrun- -are galvanic, detailed, and told with a true craftsman's love. What did he think of the Vietcong? ``The bastards—they were good.'' His battle philosophy? ``...kill my enemy before he has a chance to kill me....Never did I give Charlie an even break.'' After the aborted desert rescue of US hostages in the Tehran embassy, Marcinko was ordered to create SEAL Team Six—a counterterrorist unit with worldwide maritime responsibilities. In 1983, the unit was deployed to Beirut to test the security of the US embassy there. Easily evading the embassy security detail, sleeping Lebanese guards, and the Marines, the SEALs planted enough fake bombs to level the building. When Marcinko spoke to ``a senior American official'' about the problem, the SEAL's blunt security advice was rejected, particularly in respect to car-bomb attacks. Ninety days later, 63 people in the embassy compound were killed by a suicide bomber driving a TNT-filled truck. Profane and asking no quarter: the real nitty-gritty, bloody and authentic. (Eight-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-70390-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
Great fun.
The second installment of childhood recollections (after Opposite the Cross Keys, 1988) by mystery writer S.T. Haymon, who here evokes a sheltered 12-year-old's further encounters with life's earthier side.
Haymon's 1920's, upper-middle-class childhood revolved typically around school, home, loyal servants, and a pair of doting, well-educated parents—until age 12, when her father died and her mother decided to move to London. Refusing to accompany her, the precocious, comically self-confident Sylvia tried to limit this series of upheavals by insisting on remaining in Norfolk in the care of a favorite teacher—except that at the last minute her headmistress (already a sworn enemy) switched houses, arranging for two maiden schoolteachers to put Sylvia up in their house instead. Sylvia knew that the Misses Gosse and Locke were eccentric. What she didn't know was that the skinny, aggressive history teacher and the teary, puppy-like math professor were lesbians. Nor did she notice as Miss Locke's increasingly desperate infatuation with her began to lead the entire household toward destruction. Amusing characters abound—the gardener, Sylvia's only ally, whose faith in the value of a virgin's tips on the horse races led him to pay her for advice; the dour housekeeper who sang opera and downed bottles of gin; the art teacher's model who bewildered Sylvia with talk of "randy old dykes"; and the spiritual channel who informed her that her daddy was watching everything she did from heaven. Haymon's depiction of herself as an unusually clever, frequently petulant, and thoroughly practical young girl obsessed with filling her stomach while all sorts of passionate fireworks exploded around her evokes an era when secrets still existed and scandals were bursting to happen—and makes for slyly humorous, very British entertainment.
Great fun.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 1990
ISBN: 312-04986-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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