A potent memoir of fragility and transcendence.
A courageous chronicle of abuse and redemption.
Danish activist, economist, and writer Andersen writes with striking clarity about the first two decades of her life. The book is not only a personal story of success in the face of ongoing trauma, but also an exploration of interventions that fell short. Following a chronological format, the author catalogs the unimaginable cruelties she endured during her formative years within family encounters, foster care, group homes, and orphanages. Each account includes missed opportunities for intercession on the part of someone with the capacity and opportunity to help her emerge from “a childhood characterized by betrayal, violence, and sexual assault.” Andersen’s candor about the trusted adults who repeatedly violated her illuminates painful yet vital insights about how to recognize and address the sometimes-contradictory and often undermining effects of childhood trauma. As she chronicles how she overcame years of extreme abuse to eventually thrive, Andersen’s revelations of intimate betrayals are often chilling, and many readers may be shocked or outraged. They should continue to read, however, because the book advances an important broader purpose: undergirding the value of survivors’ voices as instrumental to guiding future policies, advocacy, and change. Closing with descriptions of visits with her incarcerated brother and estranged mother, the author shows the difference that successful interventions can make. Her history of trauma shaped her lifelong passion for protecting vulnerable populations, and this tightly distilled collection of memories serves as an urgent call to public action and reform with regard to children’s rights. This is a triumphant, empowering book that calls into question current patterns of intervention and challenges popular conceptions about what it means to believe young girls. “Whether you’re a neighbor, a social worker, a schoolteacher, or a grandparent, you must and should act,” writes Andersen. “In this book, you’ll meet many people who acted on my behalf. I hope they will inspire you to reach out as well.”
A potent memoir of fragility and transcendence.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1590-5
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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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