Chin deftly creates the palimpsest of those stories, past and present, in this candid, graceful testimony to remarkable...
This lyrical debut memoir reveals the indelible consequences of childhood abuse.
Poet and essayist Chin was raised in an atmosphere of violence. Her depressed, angry mother rejected her, and her father savagely beat her. “For as long as I can remember,” writes the author, “I knew that my parents were out of control. I knew they were capable of anything.” At the age of 11, she started running away from home; by the time she was 14, she was in jail. She spent the next years living in state-run institutions or on the streets, sleeping in stairwells “or, more often, the questionable beds of men and women.” Chin became a stripper, abused drugs and sold herself for sex. Addicted to cocaine, she realized that she had hit bottom. Drawing on a spark of inner strength, she managed to wrest control of her life, earning a GED, taking college courses and eventually completing an MFA degree. Then, in her mid-30s, married to a neurosurgeon, just having moved into their first home, she became overwhelmed with panic attacks. She was afraid to climb stairs, leave her house and drive on highways. Desperate, she sought help from an array of medical professionals, with varying success. Finally, she found a measure of peace from riding horses, particularly one skittish horse whose reaction to the world mirrored her own. Cantering, she discovered, felt “like the opposite of panic…it was only by holding on so tightly that I could begin learning how to get go.” She discovered, too, that panic “wasn’t a virus or an erratic black bird…in the end, panic was me.” Although she could not escape her past, it need not dominate the present: “No matter how many stories you put on top of the first story, the first one is always there, visible.”
Chin deftly creates the palimpsest of those stories, past and present, in this candid, graceful testimony to remarkable resilience.Pub Date: June 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3486-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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