A must-read for anyone touched by sexual abuse.
A remarkable memoir provides an absorbing depiction of abuse and its aftermath.
Marty Moran, a good boy from a Catholic family in Colorado, was 12 when he spent the weekend with a camp counselor named Bob. By day, they did manual labor, working on the summer camp Bob was building. By night, Bob slipped into bed next to Marty and molested him. The friendship, and the sex, continued for three years. Sometimes Marty joined Bob in bed with Bob’s girlfriend for a molestation ménage a trois. Other times, Bob would invite over several boys and have sex with each of them, one after another (“we were part of some secret club; a blonde, blue-eyed bordello”). At 15, Marty told Bob he was ashamed of their relationship and he never wanted to see him again. And now, in middle age, Marty tracks down his molester and confronts him. Bob is pathetic. He makes excuses. Marty is both forgiving and firm. Throughout, Moran approaches his topic with subtlety and nuance. He admits that at times he enjoyed the sex, and he doesn’t shy away from saying that it emboldened him, in fact aroused him. The author also deserves kudos for his deft treatment of the consequences of the molestation. He makes clear that the abuse formed him, shaped him, scarred him—but he never sounds whiny or victimized or predictable. As an adult, Moran wrestles with sex “addiction.” Though he’s in a long-term, stable and loving homosexual relationship with Henry, he occasionally prowls the streets and gay bars for the thrill of an anonymous coupling. Moran loves Henry, and his stable life, but he feels some compulsion for secret, hidden sex—a compulsion he knows he can trace back to Bob. Eventually, he confesses to Henry and goes into therapy. Henry stands by his man, hurt, but committed to Moran.
A must-read for anyone touched by sexual abuse.Pub Date: June 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-8070-7262-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
