A courageous release from the pain, guilt, and fury of sexual abuse.
A sexually abused man addresses his residual unprocessed anger.
Moran (The Tricky Part, 2005) tracked down, confronted, and eventually forgave “Bob,” the camp counselor who abused him at age 12. In this frank, cathartic memoir, initially a solo theatrical piece, the author reacts to being criticized for his lack of anger. “Am I avoiding, not even aware of, my own buried rage?” he asks himself. Aiming for “a bit of belated redress,” Moran formally spelled out his abuser’s last name in print, yet the tipping point came when an old childhood camping buddy, another of Bob’s molestation victims, revealed he was dying from AIDS. Intent on achieving emotional closure, the author took several explorative journeys (many related to his stage play) to unearth and quell his underlying trauma. He traveled to Johannesburg to help publicize a production of his play and experienced firsthand the vast history of the land and the sting of homophobia. Moran also witnessed a BDSM gathering during a convention of sex therapists and toured a Minnesota facility dedicated to stemming childhood sexual abuse, where he met an officer advocating castration for offenders. More emotionally resonant are his accounts of two particular trips to Colorado: one to bond with his discontented brother and one to bury him just weeks later. The death of his father brought him face to face with his stepmother, a thorny woman whom he confronted sternly but then softened toward once his sympathetic temperament surfaced. Moran’s personal history is beautifully intertwined with his work as an interpreter for Siba, an African refugee seeking asylum in America after being imprisoned and tortured. With each stop, Moran became more enlightened and inched closer to realizing that deep within him was unfinished business requiring emotional and psychological attention in order to be permanently exorcised. But his unbreakable compassion and humanitarianism remained intact through every situation. “It would appear that this business of forgiveness,” he writes, “for self and others is, indeed, an ongoing adventure.”
A courageous release from the pain, guilt, and fury of sexual abuse.Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8070-8657-5
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
