A remarkable tale of perseverance and a haunting reminder that abuse can often hide in plain sight.
A stark, shocking memoir that offers a look into the mindset of abused children.
When Anderson (The Big Fib, 2010) was very young, a school psychologist asked her if her parents ever hit her. She writes that she told him no, parroting what her “religiously devout slightly psychotic parents” instructed her to say if she was ever questioned about conditions at home: “My mommy and daddy never, ever hit me, except when I do something really bad.” Anderson writes that she was lying, and the psychologist seemed to know it, but nothing came of the meeting. In reality, she says, her parents were regularly beating, sexually abusing, and emotionally terrorizing her and her 15 siblings. Yet the outside world turned a blind eye, and none of the children were capable of betraying “The Family.” Some may find it hard to imagine how such a situation could go unnoticed for so long, but Anderson says that a combination of psychological manipulation and physical terror allowed the abuse to flourish. She frankly describes instances when she says she betrayed her siblings to protect herself (one of her titular 11 regrets) and when speaking up led to violent repercussions. She also captures the complex relationships that children often have with their abusers. Her mother, she says, could show flashes of affection, and she sometimes felt close to her father, who once told her, “Don’t ever be like me.” But these pleasant memories are few. Worst off, she says, was her younger brother, Ronald, the family scapegoat who spent his formative years handcuffed in a shower stall and eating table scraps. Yet even while suffering the most appalling kinds of neglect, Anderson writes, she retained a hope that life could be better. Her descriptions of her struggle to retain a sense of self and dignity are heartbreaking but inspiring. Eventually, she says, she saw a chance for escape and seized it, joining the Army in her late teens. Although the fates of her other siblings weren’t all so positive, this memoir’s ending offers a ray of hope in an otherwise dark story.
A remarkable tale of perseverance and a haunting reminder that abuse can often hide in plain sight.Pub Date: May 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0692415924
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Little Bear Publications
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A superb book about doing his job by a master of his craft.
The renowned writer offers advice on information-gathering and nonfiction composition.
The book consists of eight instructive and charming essays about creating narratives, all of them originally composed for the New Yorker, where McPhee (Silk Parachute, 2010, etc.) has been a contributor since the mid-1960s. Reading them consecutively in one volume constitutes a master class in writing, as the author clearly demonstrates why he has taught so successfully part-time for decades at Princeton University. In one of the essays, McPhee focuses on the personalities and skills of editors and publishers for whom he has worked, and his descriptions of those men and women are insightful and delightful. The main personality throughout the collection, though, is McPhee himself. He is frequently self-deprecating, occasionally openly proud of his accomplishments, and never boring. In his magazine articles and the books resulting from them, McPhee rarely injects himself except superficially. Within these essays, he offers a departure by revealing quite a bit about his journalism, his teaching life, and daughters, two of whom write professionally. Throughout the collection, there emerge passages of sly, subtle humor, a quality often absent in McPhee’s lengthy magazine pieces. Since some subjects are so weighty—especially those dealing with geology—the writing can seem dry. There is no dry prose here, however. Almost every sentence sparkles, with wordplay evident throughout. Another bonus is the detailed explanation of how McPhee decided to tackle certain topics and then how he chose to structure the resulting pieces. Readers already familiar with the author’s masterpieces—e.g., Levels of the Game, Encounters with the Archdruid, Looking for a Ship, Uncommon Carriers, Oranges, and Coming into the Country—will feel especially fulfilled by McPhee’s discussions of the specifics from his many books.
A superb book about doing his job by a master of his craft.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-14274-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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