A haunting tale of molestation, murder, and the power of faith that will appeal to Christian readers.
A debut memoir recounts the shocking cycle of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse a woman suffers as a young child and details her road to recovery.
Marshall’s early childhood abuse was so extensive that she buried the memories of it for many years: “Skeletons in my past include rape, incest, physical abuse, murder, scandal.” Not until her late 20s did the author begin having “back flashes of past sexual abuse.” While working with a therapist on her anxiety and depression, she recalled being raped when she was 3 years old by John, a neighborhood boy. She also became ensnared in doctor-nurse games with her older brother and a couple of his friends. Referring to herself as “Victim,” she remembers “the first time…between just her and Brother,” who told her his penis wouldn’t hurt her. Decades after the fact, she recalled a murder. Her maternal grandfather, who the family knew was a pedophile, hit her brother’s friend with a garden tool during a fight. The friend had stopped the older man from raping his sister. According to the author, her mother and brother, both of whom had been sexually molested by Marshall’s grandfather, actively participated in the crime’s coverup. Her mother told her father: “I’m not letting” him “go to jail.” Although both parents “physically abused” Marshall with beatings, her mother “didn’t need a reason to strike.” A section of “recovery Scriptures” that helped the author is included in the engrossing book along with forgiveness letters she addressed to everyone involved, including herself and God. Readers will quickly realize that Marshall, who is deeply religious, perceives the world within the confines of her Christian faith. At times, this view approaches proselytizing, as when she writes of her father, who was adopted, that she was “grateful his biological parents” didn’t abort him. Still, while therapy helped her recall the mistreatment she endured, the author deftly shows that her religious convictions enabled her to put her demons to rest through forgiveness of herself and her assailants. This is a moving story of abuse, homicide, and deceit that is most likely to strike a responsive chord among Christian believers.
A haunting tale of molestation, murder, and the power of faith that will appeal to Christian readers.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4624-1255-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Inspiring Voices
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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