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TRAUMA, SHAME, AND THE POWER OF LOVE

Name: TRAUMA, SHAME, AND THE POWER OF LOVE
Author: Christopher E. Pelloski
ISBN: 978-1-5007-5553-9

THE FALL AND RISE OF A PHYSICIAN WHO HEALS HIMSELF

by Christopher E. Pelloski ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 12, 2015

A frank remembrance that addresses the devastating long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse.

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Awards & Accolades

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In this memoir, a physician tells of how he was forced to come to terms with his own childhood trauma when his possession of child pornography was revealed.

In July 2013, Pelloski, a Columbus, Ohio, pediatric radiation oncology specialist, was away at a medical conference when he received the phone call that changed his life. A police detective informed him that his visits to child pornography websites had been discovered. His house was now being searched, and his arrest was imminent. The author writes that he was stunned and horrified about how this revelation would affect his wife and kids. He soon explained—first to his wife and then to police, lawyers, and therapists—that he’d not visited the sites for sexual gratification but to call up his own elusive memories of being sexually abused as a child so that he could try to address his own trauma. His remorse, his firm insistence that he had no sexual attraction to children, and his genuine pain over his past experiences prompted his wife to stand by him through the ordeal of house arrest, public vilification, and incarceration. He writes that he began the hard work of facing his demons. Pelloski’s narrative is compelling as he places himself at the center of a highly charged drama in which he’s the clear villain; his eventual sentence for his crimes included 366 days in federal prison. With apparent honesty and a minimum of self-pity, he dissects the exhausting and agonizing legal processes and therapy sessions that followed his arrest, and overall, his recollections are revealing and seem credible. However, the author’s occasional careless use of terms referring to male genitalia, in such lines as “At what point did we physicians…lose our balls,” is particularly jarring in the context of this upsetting narrative.

A frank remembrance that addresses the devastating long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse.

Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-5007-5553-9

Page Count: 266

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

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...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)