A frank remembrance that addresses the devastating long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse.
In this memoir, a physician tells of how he was forced to come to terms with his own childhood trauma when his possession of child pornography was revealed.
In July 2013, Pelloski, a Columbus, Ohio, pediatric radiation oncology specialist, was away at a medical conference when he received the phone call that changed his life. A police detective informed him that his visits to child pornography websites had been discovered. His house was now being searched, and his arrest was imminent. The author writes that he was stunned and horrified about how this revelation would affect his wife and kids. He soon explained—first to his wife and then to police, lawyers, and therapists—that he’d not visited the sites for sexual gratification but to call up his own elusive memories of being sexually abused as a child so that he could try to address his own trauma. His remorse, his firm insistence that he had no sexual attraction to children, and his genuine pain over his past experiences prompted his wife to stand by him through the ordeal of house arrest, public vilification, and incarceration. He writes that he began the hard work of facing his demons. Pelloski’s narrative is compelling as he places himself at the center of a highly charged drama in which he’s the clear villain; his eventual sentence for his crimes included 366 days in federal prison. With apparent honesty and a minimum of self-pity, he dissects the exhausting and agonizing legal processes and therapy sessions that followed his arrest, and overall, his recollections are revealing and seem credible. However, the author’s occasional careless use of terms referring to male genitalia, in such lines as “At what point did we physicians…lose our balls,” is particularly jarring in the context of this upsetting narrative.
A frank remembrance that addresses the devastating long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5007-5553-9
Page Count: 266
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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