A forthcoming and brave testament to our capacity to transcend the grip of trauma.
In her debut memoir, Rhyan, a Navy nurse, writes about contending with the emotional aftermath of war.
In her third deployment as a Navy nurse, Rhyan was sent to Afghanistan to work with a British trauma unit called Bastion Hospital. She landed in the thick of war and witnessed the atrocities soldiers inflict upon one another. The experience exacted a heavy toll, and her colleagues noticed the symptoms of a dangerous downward spiral—drug and alcohol abuse, dark cynicism, and hopelessness. Rhyan’s commanding officer reassigned her to the Willows in Tampa, Florida—a psychiatric facility for military personnel struggling with war-induced trauma. There, she met Riza, her tough Cuban therapist, who was trained to counter Rhyan’s well-honed skills of evasion and misdirection. Rhyan was charged with four obligations to fulfill over the course of six weeks: attend AA meetings, write a timeline of her combat experience to be read aloud in the “War Room,” compose an autobiography, and pen a letter to the person who had hurt her the most deeply. Rhyan finally came to grips with her alcoholic mother’s cruelty and narcissism and the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of an older cousin. She also wrestled with her sexual identity—it wasn’t easy being a lesbian within an institution historically hostile to the LGBT community. But Rhyan remained in the military because of the lure of financial stability—she was the primary caretaker of both her young child and feckless mother. The author’s remembrance brims with both heartache and insight, the latter often painfully excavated from the former. Rhyan’s predicament is one not often represented in popular discourse—the PTSD suffered by those who see the effects of combat without partaking in combat itself. The writing style can be distracting—long sentences densely packed with a confetti of descriptors and a relentlessly caustic humor reminiscent of William Giraldi’s Busy Monsters. The story itself, though, and the bracingly candid manner of its conveyance are deeply affecting.
A forthcoming and brave testament to our capacity to transcend the grip of trauma.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5393-2740-0
Page Count: 370
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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