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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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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