A sobering and revelatory account of a family tragedy unfolding over many years.
A mother recounts her struggle to maintain her belief in God in the face of her daughter’s life sentence in this inspirational memoir.
Debut author Hirst thought she was doing everything right. A devout Christian from a young age, she married her high school sweetheart, moved to a small Washington town to raise a family, and eventually opened two restaurants with her husband, Ron. God appeared to smile on her and her family. Then her 35-year-old daughter, Lacey, was sentenced to life without parole for hiring someone to kill her husband’s pregnant girlfriend. “Courtroom activity fades into the background as I query myself: Did I not pray correctly?” remembers the author. “Did I not believe enough in His power? Why has God forsaken my family and me?” Leading up to the trial, Hirst had been certain of her daughter’s innocence and eventual acquittal despite the widespread assumption that Lacey was guilty. Afterward, the author wasn’t sure of anything. This book is an account of how Hirst learned to be a mother to a woman permanently imprisoned, stepping in to raise Lacey’s children and supporting her daughter from the outside. It is also the story of a woman forced to restart her relationship with God from scratch. Hirst’s prose is quietly emotional and often powerful, as here when she describes her anxiety during Lacey’s long trial: “The unknown hung over me like a tornado funnel in the distance. I didn’t know where or how violently it might touch down. I cleaned closets, junk drawers, and file cabinets. By organizing unseen chaos, I attempted to regain order in my life.” The case itself—and the author’s relationship to it—is deeply engrossing while the book’s religious element is actually quite light. Hirst’s nightmare situation will be sympathetic to any reader. It is truly her quagmire—not Lacey’s—in which the audience will become ensnared. By the end, the author manages to get to a place that feels somehow redemptive, leaving readers to wonder whether they would be able to make it there as well.
A sobering and revelatory account of a family tragedy unfolding over many years.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-594-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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 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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