A sometimes grim but ultimately uplifting and tender memoir from a woman who moved beyond victim status and embraced her...
A survivor of sexual abuse and human trafficking shares her story and healing process.
When Axtell (Kore of the Incantation, 2010, etc.), a poet and musician, was a child, her male nanny abused her and sold her to other men for sex. Though she grew up believing the lies she was told by her abusers, part of her knew they weren’t true. While many women have recently stepped forward to tell their stories of abuse or harassment, Axtell’s story is different, as she focuses primarily on her healing and advocates for other women to do the same. “We are not victims, or even merely survivors,” she writes. “We are the new generation of leaders, fiercely devoted to creating a world where our lives are valued. And that begins with valuing our own voices.” The author released some of her pain through dance, writing, and singing, but she also used alcohol and unhealthy sexual relationships to mask her pain. In this candid retelling of her story, Axtell chronicles her traumatic past and the long, continuing road she has traveled to release her grief, fears, and anger and reclaim her sense of strength. Though her story is consistently heart-wrenching, readers will also share in her joy and optimism as she finds effective methods to cope with her anguish. Axtell has gone on to become an advocate for other sex abuse survivors, founding the healing community She Is Rising, and she shares the stories of a few others among her own. Perhaps the most useful section of the book is the end, where Axtell provides readers with the therapeutic techniques, mantras, meditations, and questions she has used to overcome her own pain.
A sometimes grim but ultimately uplifting and tender memoir from a woman who moved beyond victim status and embraced her full potential despite the unimaginable suffering she endured as a child.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-58005-824-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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