A compelling memoir of pain, loss, and redemption through faith.
A woman tells of getting God’s help in weathering abuse, callous parents, familial abandonment, bouts of grinding poverty, medical crises, bad marriages, and bad men in this heartfelt debut autobiography.
The author was born in Niagara Falls, New York, in 1944 to a 15-year-old unwed mother. She writes that she was sexually abused by an alcoholic stepfather at age 7, then emotionally abused by another stepfather until age 18. That year, she came home from school one day to find that her family had abruptly moved away, leaving her homeless. Reeling from that cruelty, she was soon swept off her feet by a 33-year-old truck driver who promised a home and security. The result was a loveless 16-year marriage that yielded four children, during which she says that she was beset by her husband’s alcoholism, womanizing, and drunk driving, as well as her own difficult pregnancies (including one delivery on a kitchen floor). The relationship ended in a bitter divorce. Coping with these travails drew Veltman to the church, and she writes of God answering her prayers in mysterious and traumatic ways. For example, after a 1981 car crash left her with permanent, painful spinal injuries, she then married a man who seemed a truly devoted and loving husband and father—only to experience an appalling betrayal. Heading toward her 50s, Veltman endured more bouts of destitution and homelessness, and even contemplated suicide. But she persevered, thanks to her church community, readings of Scripture, and well-timed interventions by kindly Christians, which she says were divinely inspired. There’s a lot of melodrama in this narrative of hard living and heartache, but the well-paced, engaging prose of amanuensis keeps it from growing too tearful. The themes that Veltman explores are universal and absorbing: the vulnerability of women with few options having their lives taken over by men; the never-healing psychic wounds inflicted by family strife and broken vows; and the havoc wreaked by alcohol and drugs (she vividly renders the drinking culture that surrounded her working-class family). Her description of her gradual turn toward God seems deeply felt—for example, she withdrew a malpractice lawsuit that offered financial security because of moral misgivings—and well-earned.
A compelling memoir of pain, loss, and redemption through faith.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5127-5490-2
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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