A powerful and heartrending story of personal recovery.
A memoir of an author’s traumatic teenage years and its effect on her adulthood.
As a teenager in Denver, debut author Gelt outwardly appeared to have an idyllic life. Her father was a prominent, respected attorney, her mother managed the household and hosted social gatherings, and the family appear to have had few financial concerns. However, the author experienced a series of terrible events over a short period of time, which she recounts in this book in harrowing detail. She describes a teacher who betrayed her trust with an assault, her own suicide attempt, and a violent rape at gunpoint. She also describes the impact that her mother’s deteriorating mental health and father’s coldness had on the family. The book’s power lies in the author’s skill at clearly relating life-changing occurrences; for instance, she describes how her suicide attempt changed her perspective on the world: “I woke each day in a world that I had determined to never wake in again.” Gelt also expertly uses accounts of her interactions with other people to highlight what she felt was missing in her own life. At one point, she tells of how she ran away from home and was briefly being taken in by an acquaintance and his family, which made her realize how unloved and out of place she felt in her own household: “I longed for the safety of the familiar but didn’t desire home.” She later feels a similar bond with her first husband, Jack, and his family; she notes this feeling as the reason why she kept Jack’s last name after they divorced. Gelt also memorably describes how her mother’s mental illness overshadowed her own struggles: “her suffering was a jealous child.” Ultimately, the author compellingly shows how she found the strength to persevere and confront her own mental health challenges.
A powerful and heartrending story of personal recovery.Pub Date: April 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8263-6063-2
Page Count: 280
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The stormy career of a top Navy SEAL hotspur. Commander Marcinko, USN Ret., recently served time at Petersburg Federal Prison for conspiracy to defraud the Navy by overcharging for specialized equipment—the result, he says, of telling off too many admirals. It seems that his ornery and joyous aggression, nurtured by a Czech grandfather in a flinty Pennsylvania mining town, has brought him to grief in peace and to brilliance in war. Serving his first tour in Vietnam in 1966 as an enlisted SEAL expert in underwater demolition, Marcinko returned for a second tour as an officer leading a commando squad he had trained. Here, his accounts of riverine warfare—creeping underwater to Vietcong boats and slipping over their gunwales; raiding VC island strongholds in the South China Sea; steaming up to the Cambodian border to tempt the VC across and being overrun- -are galvanic, detailed, and told with a true craftsman's love. What did he think of the Vietcong? ``The bastards—they were good.'' His battle philosophy? ``...kill my enemy before he has a chance to kill me....Never did I give Charlie an even break.'' After the aborted desert rescue of US hostages in the Tehran embassy, Marcinko was ordered to create SEAL Team Six—a counterterrorist unit with worldwide maritime responsibilities. In 1983, the unit was deployed to Beirut to test the security of the US embassy there. Easily evading the embassy security detail, sleeping Lebanese guards, and the Marines, the SEALs planted enough fake bombs to level the building. When Marcinko spoke to ``a senior American official'' about the problem, the SEAL's blunt security advice was rejected, particularly in respect to car-bomb attacks. Ninety days later, 63 people in the embassy compound were killed by a suicide bomber driving a TNT-filled truck. Profane and asking no quarter: the real nitty-gritty, bloody and authentic. (Eight-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-70390-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
Great fun.
The second installment of childhood recollections (after Opposite the Cross Keys, 1988) by mystery writer S.T. Haymon, who here evokes a sheltered 12-year-old's further encounters with life's earthier side.
Haymon's 1920's, upper-middle-class childhood revolved typically around school, home, loyal servants, and a pair of doting, well-educated parents—until age 12, when her father died and her mother decided to move to London. Refusing to accompany her, the precocious, comically self-confident Sylvia tried to limit this series of upheavals by insisting on remaining in Norfolk in the care of a favorite teacher—except that at the last minute her headmistress (already a sworn enemy) switched houses, arranging for two maiden schoolteachers to put Sylvia up in their house instead. Sylvia knew that the Misses Gosse and Locke were eccentric. What she didn't know was that the skinny, aggressive history teacher and the teary, puppy-like math professor were lesbians. Nor did she notice as Miss Locke's increasingly desperate infatuation with her began to lead the entire household toward destruction. Amusing characters abound—the gardener, Sylvia's only ally, whose faith in the value of a virgin's tips on the horse races led him to pay her for advice; the dour housekeeper who sang opera and downed bottles of gin; the art teacher's model who bewildered Sylvia with talk of "randy old dykes"; and the spiritual channel who informed her that her daddy was watching everything she did from heaven. Haymon's depiction of herself as an unusually clever, frequently petulant, and thoroughly practical young girl obsessed with filling her stomach while all sorts of passionate fireworks exploded around her evokes an era when secrets still existed and scandals were bursting to happen—and makes for slyly humorous, very British entertainment.
Great fun.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 1990
ISBN: 312-04986-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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