A moving story that will inspire fellow survivors everywhere.
A memoir about overcoming abuse to find happiness and fulfillment.
Czech relates her struggle to make peace with her painful childhood and to learn to accept emotional intimacy in her life. Her story begins when her mother flees with her boyfriend and the author after losing a custody battle with Czech’s father in Connecticut. The new family begins a life on the Ben Davis Farm in Vermont, where the author says that she was later subjected to horrifying sexual abuse by her stepfather. Fortunately, she says, several people helped her heal over the course of her life; she calls these people her “Angels.” The first and perhaps most important of these was Philippa Bassinger, the landlord of the Ben Davis Farm, who became something of a surrogate parent when she convinced Czech’s mother to allow the girl to leave home and attend first grade in Cooperstown, New York. Czech writes that other, later “Angels,” including neighbors and college professors, gave her the confidence and compassion to overcome other obstacles in life. Her decision to finally rebuff her stepfather at age 11 demonstrated remarkable strength. She ultimately severed all ties with him, but his influence lingered as she struggled with intimacy for years. Through counseling, she learned to open up and be more accepting, but her romantic relationships still proved difficult. Seeking stability, she found it where one might least expect it: she returned to the Ben Davis Farm, where she was abused for years, and became an active member of its community. As a piece of prose, this memoir occasionally flounders. For example, the titular black leather satchel, in which her mother kept family keepsakes, feels like a forced motif rather than an essential part of the story. Czech’s narration can sometimes feel like an indiscriminate recitation of facts, and readers will often wish for greater reflection. But the author’s unflinching, vivid depictions of her worst memories are a testament to her strength as a writer, and her ability to share her darkest moments with such honesty is formidable.
A moving story that will inspire fellow survivors everywhere.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Seacoast Press
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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