A powerful, topical, and incisive memoir.
A novelist’s account of how she struggled to come to terms with a traumatic sexual assault that the boarding school she attended actively tried to cover up.
Crawford entered the prestigious St. Paul’s School when she was 14. The daughter of socially ambitious upper-middle-class parents who believed in “the value of education,” she immediately felt out of place among her privileged, preternaturally sophisticated classmates. On the first day of school, she discovered that many of her age-mates already had older lovers whom they visited without their parents’ knowledge. Other aspects of St. Paul’s—racism, social hierarchies, and faculty sexual harassment of female students—also disturbed the author, who was diagnosed with clinical depression, but left her parents “unmoved.” The year after she started, Crawford was forced to perform oral sex on two popular senior athletes who threatened to report her for breaking school curfew. She developed a bleeding sore throat the school infirmary diagnosed as stemming from canker sores. Crawford later learned that the school doctor had actually noted she suffered from herpetic lesions. Branded overnight as a “whore” by fellow students, the author soon found herself excluded from female peer groups and scornfully pursued for sex by male students. When her parents became involved, school administrators told them that the “encounter…had been consensual,” implied that Crawford already had herpes, and threatened to destroy her Ivy League future if she did not remain silent. Even after detectives found proof of the school’s wrongdoing more than 20 years later, Crawford’s case was dropped because St. Paul’s influence extended deep into New Hampshire state government. Trenchant in its observations about the unspoken—and often criminal—double standards that adhere in elite spaces, Crawford’s courageous book is a bracing reminder of the dangers inherent in unchecked patriarchal power.
A powerful, topical, and incisive memoir.Pub Date: July 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-49155-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Strictly for dittoheads.
An unabashed celebration of the late talking head.
Rush Limbaugh (1951-2021) insisted that he had a direct line to God, who blessed him with brilliance unseen since the time of the Messiah. In his tribute, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis calls him “the greatest broadcaster that [sic] ever lived.” That’s an accidental anointment, given checkered beginnings. Limbaugh himself records that, after earning a failing grade for not properly outlining a speech, he dropped out of college—doubtless the cause of his scorn for higher education. This book is a constant gush of cult-of-personality praise, with tributes from Ben Carson, Mike Pence, Donald Trump, and others. One radio caller called Limbaugh “practically perfect” and a latter-day George Washington by virtue of “the magnetism and the trust and the belief of all the people.” Limbaugh insists that conservatives are all about love, though he filled the airwaves with bitter, divisive invective about the evils of liberals, as with this tidbit: “to liberals, the Bill of Rights is horrible, the Bill of Rights grants citizens freedom….The Bill of Rights limits the federal government, and that’s negative to a socialist like Obama.” Moreover, “to Democrats, America’s heartland is ‘flyover’ country. They don’t know, or like, the Americans who live there, or their values.” Worse still for a money machine like Limbaugh, who flew over that heartland in a private jet while smoking fat cigars, liberals like Obama are “trying to socialize profit so that [they] can claim it”—anathema to wealthy Republicans, who prefer to socialize risk by way of bailouts while keeping the profits for themselves. Limbaugh fans will certainly eat this up, though a segment of the Republican caucus in Congress (Marjorie Taylor Greene et al.) might want to read past Limbaugh’s repeated insistence that “peace can’t be achieved by ‘developing an understanding’ with the Russian people.”
Strictly for dittoheads.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2022
ISBN: 9781668001844
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Threshold Editions/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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