Courageous, sobering, and cathartic.
A searing, self-reflective account of adult male rape.
Historian and distinguished Colgate University professor Douglas (Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War, 2012, etc.) was just 18 when a Catholic priest whom he “knew little about” soon became “cunning, violent, and someone who obtained gratification from causing others to suffer.” A school chaplain, inebriated at a gathering, sexually molested Douglas during a violent four-hour attack; much later, the author would learn of the man’s reputation for such behavior around campus. Though it was heinous and psychologically scarring, the author eventually came to terms with the incident and began to explore the semantic trickle-down theories of such a crime: how his feral, panicked resistance contributed to its ferocity, the moral obligations of rape victims, and how gender affects the response to a rape accusation. He also needed to come to terms with the Catholic Church’s repeatedly casual dismissal of his accusations and their hushed reassignment of the undisciplined clergyman. Douglas retreated socially yet continued completing his college degree in denial, while restless sleep patterns and weight loss led to an eventual psychiatric evaluation for sexual trauma. A group of counselors attempted to haphazardly reframe his ordeal through therapy, which proved useless and only reinforced his belief that, as a male victim, he was a “walking anomaly.” Sadly, Douglas admits that though he’d experienced other crimes like burglary and property theft, those events had finite closures; his rape, however, is “always now” and continues to “rewrite the computer code of my life.” Perhaps surpassing the physical and emotional trauma of the event itself is the crushing fallout Douglas continues to experience even as a happily married husband and father who copes daily with the grim realities of sexual victimization. Through prose that is consistently eloquent and frank, some semblance of vindication only arrives after Douglas learns of the priest’s conviction and, more personally, by increasing societal awareness and struggling toward forgiveness.
Courageous, sobering, and cathartic.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8070-5094-1
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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