At times a difficult read, but the humanity and McNeil’s indomitable spirit shine through.
Helderman chronicles a woman’s journey from battered wife to advocate for victims of spousal abuse in this nonfiction work.
Two quotes set the stage for this well-researched narrative that puts a human face on an all-too-common issue. The first comes from Ginger McNeil, who tells the author, “I lived in a cabin in the woods, too poor to afford electricity, and too afraid of my husband to leave.” The second comes from Ginger’s husband, Mike, who, matter-of-factly and without remorse, comments: “One time I hauled off and slapped the fool out of her….Men will understand….I wouldn’t change a thing if I could go back.” Hearing these words, the author, then on assignment to write a magazine piece about poverty in Alabama, switched her focus to McNeil and her story. In this book, she reports with a journalist’s keen eye and ear for the telling detail and quote: “I noticed her when she came in the door,” says a county clerk worker, recalling Ginger years later. “She looked broken down, like an old hollow-eyed woman in a faded cotton print dress. I could see she was frightened to death.” The author notes that the family lived remotely, like pioneers or survivalists; “He chose this way of life for us,” McNeil explains. In Helderman’s telling, McNeil’s fraught exit from her marriage (a scene in which her husband shows up at a court hearing and hands her a picture of their dead son, a suicide victim, is chilling) feels like a hard-won triumph. The author does give Mike—now deceased—the opportunity to tell his side (“It wasn’t all bad. Ginger and me”). Though those encounters thrum with the tension of possible threats to her own safety, she does an admirable job of presenting his perspective without resorting to “gotcha” questions. But the narrative is rooted in McNeil’s bravery and her determination to tell her story as repayment to the women’s shelter workers who aided her. This is an updated version of Helderman’s award-winning 2010 book.
At times a difficult read, but the humanity and McNeil’s indomitable spirit shine through.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781950495337
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Lucid House Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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