by Martin Moran ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 2005
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
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by Martin Moran
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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