Monday, December 27, 2010
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Reflections on Jessica Stern's Denial: A Memoir of Terror
"Denial: A Memoir of Terror," by Jessica Stern (Ecco, 2010) conveys Stern's dissociation, and healing in her dawning realization of intolerable truths: sexual abuse by her grandfather, police refusal to believe that a stranger had raped her, and her compulsion to interview terrorists. She tells how weekly raping turns boys in madrasas into terrorists. She makes peace with her emotionally absent father, a Holocaust-survivor.
Sunday, December 26, 2010
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Reflections on Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
This is a reflection on "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration," by Isabel Wilkerson (Random House, 2010), an exquisitely narrated history of African-Americans in the Twentieth Century. It is based on the author's interviews of more than 1,200 emigrants who left behind cruelties in the South and followed three major routes north and west, not knowing what kind of welcome awaited them.
Saturday, December 25, 2010
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Dr. Gardner's ghost still haunts Rhode Island
Family courts in Rhode Island and elsewhere have become the best weapon for batterers to maintain control over their families after divorce by using the discredited junk science of "parental alienation," promoted by the pro-pedophile psychiatrist Richard Gardner.