PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewHe casts a wide net, determined to engage even the most enthusiastic Heller supporter ... Gentle.
Monica Potts
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewPotts blames a variety of systemic failings for Darci’s fate ... But she is at her most persuasive when she describes how religious fundamentalism... marginalizes women ... The book is awash in research, held together less by Potts’s own story than by Darci’s. The first 50 pages or so are mired in exposition ... Such data is interesting but at times gives the book the feel of a textbook. This is not to say we aren’t taken fully into this world of hardscrabble lives and tenuous survival ... I wanted Potts to be transparent about what she did and didn’t reveal to Darci.
Lacy Crawford
RaveThe Washington Post... memoirs like Lacy Crawford’s Notes on a Silencing remind us how little progress has been made. The problem persists, doggedly, but Crawford’s revelations about the insidious and systematic ways stories of assault are buried left me shaken, moved, angry. By the end, we all understand how rarely women are granted any kind of justice. The book, which chronicles her assault at a boarding school, is a reminder of how adults willingly and knowingly serve up children to trauma in exchange for maintaining their reputations ... not an unfamiliar story. But in its relentless exploration of power and hubris, it is a story that reminds us (because we apparently need reminding again and again) that women are still impotent against institutions and the men who run them ... She raises and then doesn’t explore the implications of race when we learn one of the young men who assaulted her was a person of color. It is the right decision. She neither contextualizes nor excuses his violence against her. He was, in his own way, a victim. But he is not her victim ... The book is a riveting, damning exploration of how a single moment can reshape an entire life. Crawford was victimized, but she does not remain locked in that room. She revisits the moment only when she can discover something new about it, some way to hold accountable those who refuse to take responsibility: the school, the young men, the lawyers and detectives, and indeed the very culture that creates these structures ... Crawford does what the best memoirists do: She reaches beyond a single story. She writes in what is arguably the post-#MeToo era. An era in which we tried, for a brief time, to have our stories change our institutions ... The book is a stunning, audacious attempt to reassert power over her own story.
Susan Vinocour
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review...[Vinocour] makes her case delicately, every page offering an incriminating new piece of evidence, scientific fact or court case that demonstrates just how unjust our legal system is to anyone suffering the misfortune of mental illness ... Nobody’s Child dismantles troubling legacies in our legal and mental health systems while also illuminating shortcomings in our approach to child protective services, foster care and incarceration — not to mention social ills like racism, poverty, gender and educational inequality. It is not, however, a prescriptive book. Vinocour offers no road map for how we might do better, just a long hard look at what we’ve done and where it’s brought us. But this is also the book’s power: the knowledge that we have done this to ourselves, created this system of trap doors. Vinocour leaves us there, blinking in the wonderment of our own madness.
