An inspiring David-and-Goliath story with a strong Christian tone.
The first former gymnast to go public with accusations against convicted sexual predator Larry Nassar refracts her story through the lens of her Christian faith.
Attorney and advocate Denhollander kept hearing two questions after people learned she had been molested by a team doctor for USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University: “How could this happen?” and “Why didn’t you say something sooner?” She answers both in a debut that blends memoir with a true-crime story and blistering critique of how powerful institutions deny, cover up, or mishandle sexual abuse. After suffering an injury at age 15, the author sought help from Nassar, who—without gloves or consent—vaginally penetrated her with his fingers, hiding the assault from her mother (who was in the exam room) by reaching under her baggy shorts or positioning himself strategically between parent and child. Deeply religious, Denhollander knew that the clergy often counseled abuse victims to “forgive and forget.” As she saw it, however, seeking justice “would demonstrate the love of Christ much better.” So she grieved privately until, nearly 16 years later, the Indianapolis Star exposed rampant abuse by gymnastics coaches, which led her to email the paper about Nassar. The floodgates opened after a story on her molestation appeared: Other gymnasts spoke up, the police got involved, and investigators found evidence of years of coverups by USA Gymnastics and MSU. Denhollander’s tone can be overly saccharine—she refers frequently to the “precious” abuse victims—but this is a story of true moral courage that becomes as gripping as a legal thriller in a climactic courtroom scene that has 156 abuse victims testifying against Nassar at his sentencing hearing. Spectators wept as pictures of the witnesses as young gymnasts flashed on a screen; by the end of this book, even the most cynical readers may be reaching for their own tissues.
An inspiring David-and-Goliath story with a strong Christian tone.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4964-4133-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Tyndale Momentum
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2019
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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