This courageous, empowering survival story brings the phrase “battered woman” into terrifying focus.
Washington Post columnist Steiner (editor: Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families, 2006) shares the painful story of her abusive marriage.
With a degree from Harvard, a job at Seventeen and an apartment in Manhattan, 22-year-old Steiner was ready to start her life anew after overcoming her substance-abuse problems from her teen years. When she met handsome, charming Conor, a 31-year-old investment banker, she fell hard. On a trip home to an affluent Washington, D.C., suburb to meet her divorcing parents, Conor picked a fight, furious that Steiner grew up in such a “perfect” place while he was beaten by his stepfather in working-class Boston. Although she was wary of his temper, Steiner was too in love and too sympathetic about Conor’s past to be anything but relieved when they made up days later. When he half-choked her during sex and whispered “I own you,” she was frightened but chalked it up to kinkiness. Days before their wedding, Conor slapped her when she swore at their malfunctioning laptop, but Steiner’s fear and doubts were silenced by the avalanche of seemingly irreversible wedding preparations. In steady, intimate prose punctuated by surprising, refreshing streaks of humor, the author describes how the violence escalated, including an incident in which Conor pressed a gun to her temple. Especially enlightening is Steiner’s discussion with a professor whose focus is abusive men. After a summer apart for business-school internships, Conor kept his promise not to hit her again—until one violent night when he smashed a picture frame over her head, kicked her in the ribs and strangled her until she lost consciousness. Steiner finally left, even though “leaving meant abandoning…the best part of me, that part that was not afraid to love unconditionally.”
This courageous, empowering survival story brings the phrase “battered woman” into terrifying focus.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-37745-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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