by Tanya Selvaratnam ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 2021
A courageous and compelling example of an author writing her “way out of the darkness.”
A writer and award-winning filmmaker’s account of how she fell into—and later escaped—an abusive relationship with the charismatic former attorney general of New York state.
When Selvaratnam met rising Democratic political star Eric Schneiderman in 2016, the attraction was immediate, and the texts and emails they exchanged in the weeks that followed became the prelude to a fairy-tale romance. At first, the author thought she had found a man whose transformational feminist values not only aligned with hers, but who seemed committed to defending the nation against what he knew would be Donald Trump’s inevitable “attacks on civil liberties and vulnerable communities.” However, the closer she became to Schneiderman, whose circle of acquaintances included Harvey Weinstein, the more he revealed his misogyny. An alcoholic who also combined Ambien and lorazepam, Schneiderman tried to control Selvaratnam and make himself the center of her life. His abuse also included nonconsensual, sexually sadistic behaviors such as spitting, slapping, choking, and calling her his “brown girl” slave. Terrified that “he and his people [would] try to crush me” if she spoke out, the author quietly confided in friends and her therapist. A domestic violence expert finally helped Selvaratnam, who struggled against crippling anxiety and memories of her father’s violence toward her mother, make a safe plan to leave. In the process, the author learned that the United States was “the tenth most dangerous place in the world for women” and discovered that many of Schneiderman’s associates knew about—and dismissed—his brutality. Selvaratnam then made the decision to go public with her story in the New Yorker, finding strength in the global chorus of voices that emerged as part of the #MeToo movement. Part survivor’s tale and part exposé of intimate violence, the book offers a candid, often frightening exploration of the diabolically schizophrenic ways that the patriarchy conspires to disempower women.
A courageous and compelling example of an author writing her “way out of the darkness.”Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-21424-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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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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