by Christine Ristaino ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 9, 2019
An insightful, openhearted memoir about brutality in many forms.
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Ristaino (Italian/Emory Univ.) shares a story of trauma and recovery in this debut remembrance.
On a September day in 2007, the author was entering a store from a parking lot with her two young children when their bulky, Cinderella-themed shopping cart got stuck on a curb. A man walked over, and Ristaino assumed that he meant to help her lift the cart. However, without warning, he instead launched into a violent attack against the shocked woman, injuring her jaw, shoulder, and eye. The assault changed the way that the author thought about stories that she’d heard from other women, who’d also been attacked: “Overnight, I was a member of a community,” she writes. “Stories tumbled into my pathway, one after another.” It wasn’t just other people’s experiences that engaged her, however: The assault and her attempts to write about it also awakened long-dormant memories of other events, including a molestation when she was 9 and a rape when she was in college. This book acts as a sort of trauma diary, documenting the aftermath of the 2007 attack as Ristaino attempted to deal with her new feelings of fear and weakness—as well as those of her children, who witnessed the assault. She also confronted a range of reactions of others—some racist (from white acquaintances who assumed that her attacker was black), some unsympathetic, and many simply tone-deaf—as well as alarming statistics regarding attacks on women. In addition, she began to seek closure on the earlier traumas in her life—particularly the molestation, which happened at the hands of someone close to her family whose identity she was too terrified to reveal. Ristaino writes in a clipped, controlled prose style that imparts a stark atmosphere to the work. When she tells of being concerned about leaving her kids alone with an adult acquaintance, she writes, “ ‘It has nothing to do with you. It’s my problem,’ I say. ‘I was molested as a child. So I never allow Ada to go to a house unless there are two adults there.’ He looks at me, confused, perhaps stunned.” The memoir is structured in short, incidental chapters, interspersed with brief memories that start at the attack and work backward. The chapters explore various areas of the author’s life; some are related closely to the assault (a memory of teaching her children what to do if someone tries to touch them), and others less directly linked (an analysis of the author’s relationship to her Italian heritage). She manages to weave in many relevant issues of the time period, as well, as when she tells of her extended-family members discussing Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s controversial 2009 arrest. The result is a swirling examination of many of the elements that can factor into violence in America, but it’s also a portrait of one woman’s experiences with such violence, and how she managed to find a way to avoid being destroyed by it.
An insightful, openhearted memoir about brutality in many forms.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-569-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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