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
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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