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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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