A courageous release from the pain, guilt, and fury of sexual abuse.
A sexually abused man addresses his residual unprocessed anger.
Moran (The Tricky Part, 2005) tracked down, confronted, and eventually forgave “Bob,” the camp counselor who abused him at age 12. In this frank, cathartic memoir, initially a solo theatrical piece, the author reacts to being criticized for his lack of anger. “Am I avoiding, not even aware of, my own buried rage?” he asks himself. Aiming for “a bit of belated redress,” Moran formally spelled out his abuser’s last name in print, yet the tipping point came when an old childhood camping buddy, another of Bob’s molestation victims, revealed he was dying from AIDS. Intent on achieving emotional closure, the author took several explorative journeys (many related to his stage play) to unearth and quell his underlying trauma. He traveled to Johannesburg to help publicize a production of his play and experienced firsthand the vast history of the land and the sting of homophobia. Moran also witnessed a BDSM gathering during a convention of sex therapists and toured a Minnesota facility dedicated to stemming childhood sexual abuse, where he met an officer advocating castration for offenders. More emotionally resonant are his accounts of two particular trips to Colorado: one to bond with his discontented brother and one to bury him just weeks later. The death of his father brought him face to face with his stepmother, a thorny woman whom he confronted sternly but then softened toward once his sympathetic temperament surfaced. Moran’s personal history is beautifully intertwined with his work as an interpreter for Siba, an African refugee seeking asylum in America after being imprisoned and tortured. With each stop, Moran became more enlightened and inched closer to realizing that deep within him was unfinished business requiring emotional and psychological attention in order to be permanently exorcised. But his unbreakable compassion and humanitarianism remained intact through every situation. “It would appear that this business of forgiveness,” he writes, “for self and others is, indeed, an ongoing adventure.”
A courageous release from the pain, guilt, and fury of sexual abuse.Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8070-8657-5
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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