An intimate memoir about finding closure, coupled with copious true-crime flourishes.
A veteran chronicles her postwar life in which she became an undercover law enforcement agent, started a family, and confronted hard truths of domestic violence.
In this direct follow-up to Torres’ debut memoir, Still Standing (2014), readers rejoin the Latina veteran of the first Iraq War after she returned stateside, working as a narcotics agent. Gone is the death wish that drove her into the military after a prom night rape; it’s replaced here with courage as she faced exciting opportunities in her new career. She presents a firsthand view of what it’s like to do undercover work as a woman, stripped of the fictions of movies and television—a no-nonsense account of buys-and-busts, prostitution stings, and a deep cover, Donnie Brasco–esque operation at a social club. Beneath it all is Torres’ continued emotional struggle as a rape survivor as she attempted to open up and cultivate healthy relationships. While vacationing in Cuba, she fell for Narciso, a charming native who soon came to the United States, where they married and had a daughter. Yet this happiness was short-lived: Narciso swung mercurially between being violent and apologetic, turning her home into a place that was more unpredictable than the crime-ridden streets. Torres excels at depicting this tension, and offers a remarkable, candid portrayal of a physically capable, emotionally intuitive woman who finds herself in an atmosphere of abuse. It’s difficult to discuss this book without referencing its predecessor, however, as it ties up many of Still Standing's loose ends—most importantly, the fact that Torres finally confronted the man who raped her. That trauma is less present in this volume; instead, she refers to it only in passing, which renders the book less powerful. Otherwise, though, this is an impeccably edited story about the long- and short-term effects of rape and abuse, told from an unusual perspective.
An intimate memoir about finding closure, coupled with copious true-crime flourishes.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-938812-51-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: Full Court Press
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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