An engrossing memoir about overcoming childhood sexual trauma.
The frank chronicle of a physician recovering from a traumatic childhood stunted by shame.
Internist, wellness radio host and public speaker Spinelli (The Advocate Guide to Gay Men’s Health and Wellness, 2008) openly shares the harrowing episodes of sexual abuse he endured as a youth and the ripple effect that lasted well into his adult life, until he decided to find closure in his 40s. After fulfilling many of his adult life goals, such as a lucrative private practice, home ownership and a publishing deal, it was a loving gay relationship that proved most elusive for the lonesome author. A particularly nerve-racking blind date with handsome Chad reconfirmed a barrage of neurotic insecurities, including a bizarre bathroom ritual caused by Spinelli’s paruresis, a social-anxiety phobia rendering one unable to urinate in the (real or perceived) presence of others. The narrative backtracks to the late 1970s, tracing Spinelli’s youth as a chubby Italian boy from Staten Island who, at 11, first met Scoutmaster “Bill,” a ruthlessly seductive man who lured several youth into his bedroom for “boy bonding.” But his dating life soon takes a back seat to the author’s aggressive investigational probe into his molester’s history: a pedophilic sociopathic police officer who the author discovered had not only penned a memoir decades earlier, but adopted 15 wayward boys into his home. Their anguished phone confrontations and Bill’s resultant trial, conviction and imprisonment make for intensely bracing reading. Spinelli’s cleansing confessional becomes the graceful release he’d waited decades to experience. “Closing the door…I caught a glimpse of myself in the beveled glass,” writes the author. “There I was. Not some fractured, mirrored reflection of my former self, but me: short, pee-shy, a man able to make the future better than the past.”
An engrossing memoir about overcoming childhood sexual trauma.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7582-9132-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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