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
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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