Despite its sheepish title, this is a commanding story not of a little girl lost, but of a woman-survivor who found herself and God in the painful aftermath of rape. Joseph enjoyed a storybook midwestern childhood until she was eight, when her loving father was killed in an engineering accident. His death threw the family in a quandary: Joseph’s mother sank into a decade-long battle with manic-depression, and Joseph and her three older brothers were left to fend for themselves. But by age 18, the young woman and her family had turned their lives around. Joseph became a model student and committed evangelical Christian, and was elected homecoming queen. Yet her world was about to be torn asunder once again. Shortly after her high school graduation and before her marriage, Joseph was raped at gunpoint in a mall parking lot by a serial rapist who had disabled her car. Joseph again employed her faith to emerge triumphant from this dark, painful time, encouraging the rapist’s other victims to file charges against him. After his conviction, she continued to struggle with trauma from the rape. Her memoir speaks honestly of her fears of sexual relations with her new husband and the deep anger she had welling inside her, ready to be unleashed on the people she loved the most. Joseph found healing by speaking out about her experience, first to local church groups and eventually to a national audience on the 700 Club. She also testified in another court case (her attacker attempted to rape another woman soon after his speedy parole), even finding the courage to present the rapist with a monogrammed, leather-bound Bible, which she prayed he would read. Moving and very frank, Joseph’s story will offer courage to many women, Christian and otherwise, who have been victims of rape. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 4, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-49239-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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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