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TAKING BACK MY LIFE

A rape victim's compelling story is combined here with a provocative examination of the issues raised by the crime from the perspectives of the victim, her husband, the counselor who treated her at a rape crisis center, the prosecutor and defense attorney in the case, and the newspaper editor who brought the story to national prominence. Early on the morning of November 19th, 1988, Ziegenmeyer, a 28-year-old wife and mother of three, was on her way to a local Des Moines school to take an exam for her real-estate license when she was assaulted in the school's parking lot and forced to drive her assailant to a secluded spot, where he raped her. The months that followed brought about Ziegenmeyer's transformation from a cringing, traumatized victim who had to have her husband walk with her to the bathroom in the middle of the night into an avid crusader for victims' rights. The trial of her assailant was postponed four times, to Ziegenmeyer's frustration, as his attorneys challenged the new technique of DNA identification in semen, the prosecution's main weapon in the case. Ziegenmeyer dealt with her rage and impatience by contacting the Des Moines Register; after the rapist's conviction, the newspaper's series thrust Ziegenmeyer into the spotlight of local and national attention. She was flown around the country to appear on talk shows, and she spoke at victims'-rights assemblies, lawyers' conventions, and, finally, before the US Senate. Ziegenmeyer comes across as a feisty, smart, ordinary woman, warts and all, who throughout her ordeal has retained the good sense of her Iowa farm upbringing. And coauthor Warren, a former Esquire editor, has done a fine job of interweaving the voices of the other principals in the case. Skip Eileen Ross's Savage Shadows (p. 1458) and look to this for insight into a rape victim's experience and the way she courageously used it to raise consciousness about this form of violence. (Film rights sold to CBS-TV.)

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-671-73455-5

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1991

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969

ISBN: 0375507892

Page Count: 235

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969

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