A fractured, unpolished but chilling record of dark institutional misdeeds.
After being hospitalized as a girl in 1950s Montreal, memoirist Rossi recalls her years spent as an unwilling medical test subject, most likely under a project funded by the CIA.
Too much of Rossi’s life took place in institutions, beginning at age 6 when her mother abandons her at an orphanage without informing the rest of the family. Rossi eventually returns home, only for her father to die, which results in another 4-year-long orphanage stint. After getting out, Rossi contracts hepatitis; at age 16 she’s checked into Royal Victoria Hospital, a teaching hospital. There, her prescribed drugs include a tranquilizer known to aggravate hepatitis—unsurprisingly, she doesn’t recover. Worse, she grows depressed, which leads to a transfer to the hospital’s psychiatric arm—the Allan Memorial Institute, with clandestine funding from the CIA—and back again, several times over the next three-and-a-half years. That’s where her initial indignities—painful needles, pills swallowed without water, manhandling by interns—transform into abject mistreatment: she’s injected with mysterious, deleterious drugs and deprived their antidotes; doctors wheel her into the operating theatre for unauthorized surgeries; and cruel sleep therapy keeps her mostly asleep for a month. Most of the startling though stiff and disjointed narrative is pure description, with little dialogue or emphasis on scene-setting and plot trajectory. Misplaced excerpts abruptly interrupt the narrative without explanation, while numerous spelling and grammatical errors distract from the agony as well. Fortunately, Rossi survived to lead a happy adult life—this book serves as a testament to her unbreakable will. But a cleaner presentation and sharper perspective are needed to carry this litany of injustices beyond sympathy into whole-hearted outrage.
A fractured, unpolished but chilling record of dark institutional misdeeds.Pub Date: July 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-1426970368
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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