An anatomy of survival, which could prove vital to those marked by sexual abuse.
Husted, an accomplished actor, comes to terms with childhood sexual abuse in this courageous yet harrowing debut memoir.
Husted is the youngest of three brothers who grew up in rural Michigan with an absent father who had a string of criminal offenses ranging from minor misdemeanors to check fraud. Their mother was a fragile, somewhat naive woman who, in search of financial security, married George, the stepfather of nightmares. Appearing benevolent at first, he revealed himself to be venomously strict with the brothers. Alarm bells rang when he forced them to strip naked and lie backside up on the bed. He subjected the boys to brutal whippings with a belt while seeming to gain gratification from viewing their prone bodies. George manipulated the boys by paying them to give him massages, and the author reveals how, at 8 years old, he was encouraged to explore his stepfather’s body, which ultimately led to him sexually gratifying the older man. This abuse became a regular occurrence, and the author explains how a young boy can easily confuse a sexual predator’s coercions with an act of love. The encounters, described in detail, are heartbreakingly difficult to read. The boy becomes a self-fashioned detective, trying to ascertain whether the relationship he is experiencing is discernible in other family units. Cracks begin to show when his older brother Gary stands up to George, threatening him with an ax and accusing him of molestation. Bewilderingly, the boys’ mother chooses to ignore the accusations and continues her relationship with George. The memoir is a survival narrative, about growing up and coming to understand not only the abuser but those who enable the abuse. The author also openly describes coming to terms with his own sexuality as he realizes that he is attracted to men. The almost unbearable psychological trauma depicted here is offset by a powerful positivity as the author turns valiantly to face his past head on, writing with an admirable eloquence and honesty.
An anatomy of survival, which could prove vital to those marked by sexual abuse.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1492243014
Page Count: 250
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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