A potently rendered chronicle of rape and the clarity and closure achieved even when justice is only partially served.
The story of a Pennsylvania serial rapist who stood trial two decades after his assault on the author.
Mystery writer Winslow (The Red House, 2015) was a religiously chaste junior studying acting at Carnegie Mellon University in 1992 when she was violently raped in her apartment by Arthur Fryar. Police had few clues and little DNA to compare to the author’s forensic evidence, so the investigation stagnated—though the victim prodded the revolving team of detectives to continue sleuthing throughout the ensuing years. Winslow arrestingly depicts the rape and its harrowing physical and psychological fallouts as well as the undermining effects on her adult life as she struggled to connect emotionally and romantically with men. Though Fryar attacked another girl later that same year, his DNA only entered the criminal justice network after a drug arrest in 2002. After constant prodding, cold case rape kit DNA was reintroduced into the system, and matches were found to provide sufficient evidence to prosecute Fryar in 2013, but Winslow’s case remained unattributed to him. Her adult life as a married mother of two and an American expatriate living in “polite and formal and circumspect” Cambridge, England, was refocused on obsessively investigating Fryar herself and unearthing enough sound, actionable ties linking him to her assault. Winslow doggedly uncovered more about her rapist and prepared for a media-hyped trial with the aid of persistent investigators. Despite legal red tape—including Pennsylvania’s statute of limitation laws, which can only be overturned with DNA evidence—Fryar emerged as the smug prime suspect. Urgently written with forthright prose, the memoir’s serpentine suspense elements resemble the plot points seen in the kind of crime fiction the author writes herself. She doesn’t skimp on the intimate details of the intimidating court case or the mettle necessary to endure what proved to be a winding, mentally challenging, and ultimately disappointing journey toward retribution.
A potently rendered chronicle of rape and the clarity and closure achieved even when justice is only partially served.Pub Date: May 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-243480-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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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