A sympathetic, instructive story of resilience.
A girl learns how much grit and grace it takes to make it out of poverty in this debut memoir.
Singer/songwriter Moore opens her recollection of her childhood on a portentous note: her grandmother Dot revealed that spirits were after the young girl. This detail would prove prophetic for Moore, whose memoir is full of accounts of visitations from her late grandmother. But these spirits were nothing, it seemed, compared to the harm that living people inflicted on her. She and her sister were raised by her grandmother and her hot-tempered, teenage mother, and the author writes that she had to provide her mother with just the right amount of eye contact to avoid beatings. In one incident, she says, her mother burned her sister’s leg with an iron and lied about it; in another, she writes that her mother’s one-time boyfriend molested her and her sister. The family moved from city to city, relative to relative, as they tried to survive. The abuse persisted, Moore says; once, her mother broke a plaque depicting Jesus’ Crucifixion over the head of her then-stepfather. After the author became pregnant from a rape, she had an abortion and ran away from home and eked out a living with her sister and their friends, who stole to survive. After several returns home and failed, injurious relationships, she found a partner who proved reliable—and brave enough to stand up to her mother. Overall, the memoir is unrelenting in its intensity; it often seems as if the domestic and sexual violence will never end. But even more remarkable is Moore’s approach to describing her traumas, which is laudably unsentimental, unflinchingly realistic, and even occasionally witty. Despite the author’s apparent lack of interest in sugarcoating her experiences, she ends her memoir, convincingly, on a note of optimism. Perhaps it’s the very same optimism that helped her live through unfathomable cruelty so that she could go on to become a successful musician.
A sympathetic, instructive story of resilience.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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