A woman's excrutiatingly painful and explicit account of 14 years of incestuous abuse. With great courage and startling compassion, Silverman tells the story of how her father, once chief counsel to the secretary of the Interior and later an international banker, made her his sexual companion. Beginning when she was four years old, the incest escalated from fondling in the bathtub to oral and finally full-fledged and frequent vaginal intercourse. With her mother's unspoken acquiesence (``I was a present to her husband'') Silverman became a willing instrument in calming her beloved father's frequent rages. Extraordinarily frank (``It feels good, yes. I discover its pleasure before its shame''), Silverman is able to recreate the emotional trail that leads from terror to pleasure, from confusion and fear to disassociation. Two new personalities emerge to take the brunt of her father's sexual forays. One is Dina, passive and wanting only to please; the other is Celeste, angry, challenging, and hungry. But even with these guardian personae, the little girl Sue remains acutely vulnerable. As a second-grader, she felt so unprotected that she dropped out of school for a year; a few years later, during an especially traumatic period, she spent most of three months sleeping. As Silverman enters adolescence, she struggles to break away, but not until she leaves for college does her father abruptly stop his sexual marauding. Silverman spends the next 30 years trying to understand and control both her sexual aggressiveness and her self-starvation—an attempt, in essence, to make her abused body disappear. With therapy and a loving husband, she succeeds and, almost unbelievably, comes to terms with her parents as well. Harrowing in its depiction of savage violation and profoundly moving in its portrait of a child's fear, confusion, and desperate search for a safe place.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8203-1870-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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