A bittersweet and engrossing literary heirloom filled with family secrets, haunting memories, and striking challenges.
A Vermont-based artist and musician chronicles the serpentine saga of her family’s legacy of struggles and abuse in this debut memoir.
With cleareyed, unvarnished prose and dynamic details, Bedi vividly traces her family lineage back to her ancestors’ arrival on American shores as Slavic immigrants “during the first decade of the twentieth century.” But across this ancestral lore are several dark shadows in the form of murder, suicide, and interfamilial abuse. These tragedies shook the Bedi bloodline to its core and soured the author’s youth and adulthood. Through the use of family tree graphics, photographs, official records, newspaper clippings, and her own memories, the author generously shares the story of her paternal grandfather, Eli, who was murdered in 1917, supposedly at the hands of his wife, Flora. Bedi believes the crime was spurred by a love triangle and that Flora’s lover “actually killed Eli.” When Flora was charged with homicide, her children (including the author’s father) were placed in a Vermont orphanage where they grew up in a neglectful, abusive environment. Bedi’s maternal grandfather killed himself over “the loss of the Czar’s Russia” and “the shame” of incestuous affairs. Her father became a gifted machinist while her mother, Laura, born to Russian immigrants, grew up on a farm and was unpredictable as an adult. Unafraid to reveal the truth about her family’s melodrama, Bedi writes candidly about the bewilderment she felt over her parents’ mismatched marriage in 1937, given that her tempestuous mother “clearly was mentally ill and Dad was an abused orphan.” In this melancholy account, she expresses outrage at Laura and “Gram” for allowing a legacy of intergenerational abuse to proliferate within their family for decades. Despite the hardships experienced by her ancestors that infused her worldview, Bedi’s own history in the final chapter is evoked with generous anecdotes about her immense artistic interests in music education even as her aging mother’s mental state deteriorated further. Upon Laura’s death, the author “cried then, not because she was dead but because the chance for her to realize what she had done was dead too.” Though her mother’s cycle of cruelty died with her, Bedi admits to still struggling toward complete forgiveness and some catharsis as an adult survivor of child abuse, and that her own happiness remains a work in progress.
A bittersweet and engrossing literary heirloom filled with family secrets, haunting memories, and striking challenges.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5320-5790-8
Page Count: 66
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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