by Shawn Alex Nemeth ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 20, 2017
An affecting tale of triumph over brutal debasement.
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A debut memoir chronicles a man’s struggle with his sexual identity and the ghastly abuse he suffered as a child.
Nemeth was born in a small town in Ohio in 1969, and starting at an early age, he suffered withering mistreatment. His book portrays his mother as an irresponsible alcoholic largely indifferent to his happiness, and his stepfather, Jed, as terrifyingly mercurial, by turns cruelly violent or sulkily detached. According to the author, Nemeth’s biological father also took pleasure in the infliction of fear, and tortured the boy for the sake of his own cruel delight. And, Nemeth charges, Jed’s brother, Owen, sexually abused both the author and his half sister, Hailey, transgressions appallingly tolerated by the children’s custodians. In addition, the author wrestled with his attraction to boys, feelings that caused him a profound sense of shame and which he could confide to no one. Nemeth found some solace in his spirituality—he started attending church on his own at the age of 7, and his faith in Jesus was lovingly nurtured by his grandmother. He combined that source of strength with a passion for music—he attended a high school in Ohio with an excellent music and theater program, and studied vocal performance in college. He was eventually ordained a minister and toured the world as the director of a musically charged ministry. But Nemeth’s childhood trauma haunted him, as did his unresolved sexuality—he remained so conflicted he married a woman to whom he had no physical attraction. He struggled with drugs and alcohol, and contracted HIV from someone he believes knowingly infected him. The author’s remembrance is disarmingly forthright, a courageous confessional that is moving for its honesty alone. His prose is effortlessly limpid, though the story isn’t always told in in an unambiguously linear fashion, and the sequences of events can be a touch confusing. The dramatic culmination of the recollection is Nemeth’s forgiveness of his tormentors, a profound lesson in the transcendence of past pain (“Forgiveness is the healing ointment to the aching wounds of disappointment; the key that unlocks the prison door of anger. Forgiveness is the medicine that cleanses the soul from the poisonous toxicity of bitterness and resentment”). Furthermore, he furnishes an important meditation on the reconciliation of homosexuality and Christian life.
An affecting tale of triumph over brutal debasement.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5487-9870-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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