Prose that vividly and courageously articulates a cautionary tale of abuse, with more than a nod to pathological...
In this memoir, a battered wife endures years of beatings in silence.
There were signs from the very beginning that Hafner’s (Where Do I Go from Here, 2001, etc.) husband had anger issues. Jack Brennan was quick to blame others for tiny irritations, ranting compulsively about perceived injustices at work, and the first time he punched her in the arm was two days before their wedding. But he was exciting and attentive, a bit of a rebel with his longish hair, and a delightfully energetic lover. The year was 1969; Hafner was turning 25 and looking for love. She was in her fourth year as a French teacher at a Long Island high school; he was the new young science teacher. The chemistry between them was intoxicating. One year later, they were married. In her harrowing tale, Hafner recounts years of shame, fear, and beatings that followed the hopeful nuptials. Violent episodes are interspersed with glorious days at the beach and the joy of refurbishing a small house the couple bought on a South Shore canal. Then there was the tenderness with which Brennan treated the two cats he adopted from a shelter. This was just enough for Hafner to deny to herself what was happening, to continue making excuses for him: “I decided that his anger was just an expression of passion for life, and I had to accept him as he was…I wasn’t even beginning to guess where it might go.” In this brutally honest account, played out against the music of the ’70s, Hafner graphically depicts Brennan’s eyes turning cold and his rants gaining manic momentum, finally resulting in a punch to her face or a chair thrown at her head—all of it happening rapidly, unpredictably, without more than a minute or two of warning. The author found herself living two lives—one at work where she was happy and successful, and one at home where she disappeared into a shell, frozen in terror. After one violent episode, Hafner recounts: “I unwound myself, stood up on shaky legs, and opened the freezer and smoothed an ice cube along my face. I didn’t cry though. Tears were nowhere near. I felt no sadness, no anger. Fear trumped them both.”
Prose that vividly and courageously articulates a cautionary tale of abuse, with more than a nod to pathological codependence.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63152-149-2
Page Count: 206
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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