An honest and compelling memoir of reckoning with a difficult past and struggling toward a brighter future.
A former newspaper columnist’s account of how she survived being held hostage in her native Brazil before leaving to build a new life in the United States.
In 2013, the Brazilian National Truth Commission approached Keilt for testimony about her experiences with Brazilian police brutality nearly 40 years earlier. She began her story in São Paulo, where she grew up surrounded by opulence. Yet her “fairy tale life” was privately riven by her mysterious ex-military father’s “terrible, unpredictable rages” and the feeling that “something dangerous” always lurked in the shadows. In 1976, Keilt married Rick, a young American with whom she had fallen in love. Seemingly destined for a “golden future,” their lives were shattered a few months later when police assaulted them in their home and led them away in handcuffs. Charged with possession of a backpack full of cocaine neither had ever seen before, they were taken to a foul-smelling “dungeon” where “screams of pain, desperation and anger” filled the air. Both were raped and tortured for the next 45 days while a family lawyer worked to secure the $400,000 the captors demanded. Unspeakably scarred from her ordeal, Keilt soon found herself under pressure from her parents and especially her father to “forget it all” and remain silent about her experiences. Unable to live a lie and stay with the bitter, broken man her husband had become, the author fled to the U.S. a few years later. Keilt struggled as a waitressing single mother in California, for a time using sex and drugs to escape her pain. When her parents bought her a modest home as a gesture of reconciliation, the author finally began to find the peace that allowed her to heal. Moving and cathartic, Keilt’s book courageously confronts personal and national trauma as it reveals the resilience of the human spirit.
An honest and compelling memoir of reckoning with a difficult past and struggling toward a brighter future.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-571-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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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