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THE SOLACE OF STONES

Name: THE SOLACE OF STONES
Author: Julie Riddle
ISBN: 978-0-8032-7686-4

FINDING A WAY THROUGH WILDERNESS

by Julie Riddle ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2016

Evocative prose illuminates the narrative’s people and places, but the author’s prolonged self-absorption eventually becomes...

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Riddle (Senior Writer/Whitworth Univ.) chronicles her life growing up in the Montana wilderness.

The author relates how her seemingly idyllic childhood was darkened by the shadow of child abuse. In 1977, her parents moved their family to Troy, a small Montana town with a population of 950 people, where they purchased 21 wooded acres. Her family thrived while her father built a log home and they lived in a camper for three years. Before the move to the wilderness, they had lived in Butte, Montana, where the author and her brother had attended day care for several days a week. There, Riddle, then 5, was sexually abused by the director's husband. She kept silent about it because of his threat that he would kill her brother should she reveal his abuse. Though the author was eventually able to push the incident out of her mind, she was afflicted with nightmares and anxiety. In adolescence, she had dark sexual fantasies that frightened and shamed her. She attributes this partly to her passivity in enduring a relationship with a sexually abusive, demanding boyfriend, which exacerbated her anxiety. Riddle writes that her willingness to endure it was likely the result of the aftermath of the abuse she suffered as a child. After graduating college, she took a temporary job teaching English to students in Japan. While there, she found solace by holding a stone taken from a creek near her childhood home, but she was afflicted with severe anxiety and had to return home prematurely. Diagnosed with clinical depression and belatedly with celiac disease (which she believes to be stress-related), Riddle has continued to receive therapy and medication. Now happily married, although childless by her own decision, the author has slowly come to terms with the brutality she suffered as a child. Riddle writes movingly about the healing bonds of family, but by the end, her story grows a bit thin.

Evocative prose illuminates the narrative’s people and places, but the author’s prolonged self-absorption eventually becomes tedious.

Pub Date: April 1, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-8032-7686-4

Page Count: 300

Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska

Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH HAS A POWER OF ITS OWN
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HISTORIC UNFULFILLED PROMISE
by Howard Zinn

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.