The traumatic and illuminating events suffered by a teenage girl who dared to say she was gay in a religious community that...
A memoir of a lesbian Mormon who stood up for her rights.
When 15-year-old Cooper told her parents that she was gay, she had no idea she would cause a tidal wave in her Mormon family and community. "I can see how terrifying it must have been, for my mom especially,” she writes, “because our religion told her there was no place for people like me, no place in the faith and the community that held her world together, and no place in God's plan." Unable to deal with the issue, the author’s parents sent her to Utah to live with a strict Mormon family who swore they could change and “cure” her of her homosexuality. Their treatment methods were abusive, both physically and verbally, and Cooper struggled to survive each day for the eight months she had to live with this couple and their family. The author’s prose is expressive, honest, and moving as she writes about how she battled to balance her own sense of faith and acceptance of her sexual identity with the strong tenets being forced upon her, which excluded gay people completely. Surrounded by Mormons who believed the couple was doing the right thing and ignored Cooper's pleas for help, she had to draw on inner strengths that she didn't know she had. Eventually, she managed to find help from other gay people hidden in the community and outside the state of Utah. Cooper's story demonstrates how a strong belief in any religion can cause people to do great harm to other humans simply because that religion justifies their methods and actions. It also shows how it is still possible to endure and prevail.
The traumatic and illuminating events suffered by a teenage girl who dared to say she was gay in a religious community that doesn't readily accept homosexuality.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-237460-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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