Readers searching for full and consistent contrition may be uncomfortable, but those seeking a greater understanding of...
The Tony Award–winning playwright and bestselling author excavates the violent truths of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse in a painful quest for healing.
Told from the perspective of the father who committed countless wrongs against his child, Ensler’s (In the Body of the World: A Memoir of Cancer and Connection, 2013, etc.) latest is a chilling portrait from the broken mirror of his memories; only in the final pages will readers find the narrator’s candid acceptance of responsibility for this sadistic history. Fully amplifying her father’s warped perceptions, the author provides an exacting, revealing glimpse into the psychology of gaslighting from the view of a perpetrator. Ensler effectively unearths tragic betrayals of trust and the multiple terrors survived by her younger self. Her father’s twisted attention and attempted sabotages persisted as he notes the criticisms he planted to undercut his daughter’s growth and independence at every turn. Paternal contempt followed the author through high school and beyond, and she captures it all in a fevered account that traces periods of resistance, rebellion, self-destruction, creativity, and sobriety in the years she spent seeking to break from the restrictions cast by a father obsessed with violating her agency. Ensler’s father is certain to frustrate readers looking for a more concrete sense of justice, and the graphic catalogue of sexual abuses and physical violence will challenge most readers and trigger some. Still, this is a potent, necessary narrative of healing, and the author succeeds in her “attempt to endow my father with the will and the words to cross the border, and speak the language, of apology so that I can finally be free.” This imagined voice is as intimate as it is alarming, and Ensler also taps into a broader struggle, seeking to hold all perpetrators of abuse accountable for their actions.
Readers searching for full and consistent contrition may be uncomfortable, but those seeking a greater understanding of psychological manipulation will appreciate this powerful examination.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63557-438-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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