An inspiration for those attempting to come to terms with abuse.
An Appalachian memoir from a woman who escaped a cycle of violence, substance abuse, and self-loathing in order to find her voice.
Debut author Conn grew up in a Kentucky holler in the 1980s. As a child, she endured a life marked by poverty and abuse, both of which were common in the region. Her father was an alcoholic drug dealer who often beat her and her mother and brother. In order to survive, she silently endured the pain as her distrust for others grew. Soon, Conn fell into her own cycle of drug abuse as well as physical and sexual abuse from her circle of companions. “By the time I became a young adult,” she writes, “I had grown suspicious of my intuition, my judgment, even my own feelings.” She continues later, “I never felt safe to defend myself or to claim any right to be treated differently.” The author discovered that the only way she could stop hating herself, her life, and everyone around her was to become a different person. Fortunately, she was a good student, and she managed to escape to college and then graduate school. However, her past still haunted her. On the encouragement of a mentor, she decided to share her story. At times, the narrative is fragmented and disconnected, perhaps due to Conn’s struggle to make sense of it all, but the author is to be commended for her courage and determination to change her life circumstances. “I wrote it and rewrote it over the years to come,” she writes, “each time seeing more clearly that I had become the storyteller, that it was my story and that I had to tell it. With each revision, I understood that although many people had quieted me, even whipped me into silence, I still had words they could not take away from me.”
An inspiration for those attempting to come to terms with abuse.Pub Date: May 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5420-0416-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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