An eloquent and unsettling story of recovery that features solid advice and encouragement for other trauma victims.
Brooks debuts with a memoir of her struggle to recover from a traumatic assault.
On June 28, 2008, the 22-year-old author was living in Alexandria, Virginia, with her then-boyfriend and working at a prestigious accounting firm in Washington, D.C. That night, her boyfriend was out with friends, so she contacted a cousin who lived in Washington. After a night out, Brooks planned to spend the night at her cousin’s apartment until her boyfriend called and asked her to come home. Her cousin called a cab, and Brooks waited at the curb until a dark SUV pulled up; thinking it was her ride, she got in. Soon afterward, on the side of a deserted highway, the driver raped her, and he later dropped her off near her home. Brooks ran down her block screaming before her boyfriend and his friend met up with her. The police arrived and sent her to the local precinct, where she underwent hours of hostile questioning by detectives who dismissed her with an assurance that “this will all blow over and be fine. Best of luck.” On her own initiative, she went to the hospital to have a rape-kit examination performed, but the kit wasn’t processed for 18 months. In engaging, emotional prose that’s peppered with well-placed expletives, Brooks tells the infuriating story of her four-year quest to obtain some justice from the legal system and of her difficult journey to find peace within herself: “My life felt like scattered beads all over the floor from a broken clasp on a necklace,” she writes early on. With unvarnished honesty, she details her attempts to get her life back together; along the way, she struggled with alcohol abuse that led to blackouts and rages. She effectively tells of how broken she felt but also reveals her fierce determination to find normalcy and how her loved ones provided her with unflagging support.
An eloquent and unsettling story of recovery that features solid advice and encouragement for other trauma victims.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63393-966-0
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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