Another stunning work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Rhodes - this
one an account of his personal triumph over a childhood of
deprivation and abuse. "When I was thirteen months old, my mother
killed herself," Rhodes begins. Too young to comprehend her
suicide, Rhodes nevertheless became aware of a yawning emptiness
that he later described as a "hole in the world." Rhodes and his
brother, Stanley, spent the next nine years in a series of Kansas
City boardinghouses with their father until he remarried and the
brothers' world was shattered again. Their new stepmother so
passionately resented the boys' presence that she begrudged their
every bite of food, made them sleep in a concrete storeroom behind
their apartment, and barred them from the house until dark. Rhodes
and his brother spent their days rummaging through trash cans for
food, loitering in shops to escape the winter's cold, and wandering
the underground sewer pipes to kill time until they were allowed
back inside the house. Half-starved, adrift, and a fanatic devotee
of heroic comic books and science fiction, Rhodes was at last
placed in the Andrew Drumm Institute, where neglected boys raised
their own crops, butchered their own livestock, and were encouraged
to take responsibility for their lives. Thirty years have passed
since Rhodes escaped Missouri via a scholarship to Yale. Yet only
after having indulged his fascination with the ultimate "hole in
the world" (The Making of the Atomci Bomb, 1986), and revisited the
environment in which he came of age (Farm), is he able to confront,
in this intimate, scrupulously honest account, the irretrievable
loss of his childhood. "I was saving the story for fiction," Rhodes
confesses, "a red giant set somewhere neat' the end of the world,
something Wagnerian." It is a tribute to his unerring instincts as
a writer that this "a cappella" nonfiction version proves so much
more terrifying and transformative. (Kirkus Reviews)
When he first published "A Hole in the World" in 1990, Pulitzer
Prize-winner Richard Rhodes helped launch and legitimate a
decade-long publishing phenomenon--the memoir of abused childhood.
In this tenth anniversary edition, Rhodes offers new reflections on
the abuse he and his older brother endured at the hands of their
terrorizing stepmother and negligent father. He also describes
readers' powerful and moving responses to his book, considers his
changing sentiments as the years have passed, and provides
additional details on his brother Stanley, who remains the author's
true hero in this moving memoir.
"Unlike too much of what is offered for public edification (and
titillation) in this our age of confession, A Hole in the World
comes straight from the heart with no apparent self-serving
motives. Richard Rhodes is here to tell us three things, all of
them important and useful. The first is that it is dangerous and
self-deluding to sentimentalize a myth of idyllic American
childhood. The second is that a child caught in a hell not of his
own making must devise strategies for survival and must cry out for
help; there are others, outsiders, ready to provide it. The
third-and to those caught in their own torment the most
important-is that it is possible to escape, to rise above hurt and
rage, to live a life that is useful and good. A timely contribution
to the literature of a problem we are only beginning to
understand."--Jonathan Yardley, "Washington Post."
"The deepest significance of Rhodes's prose is its spring-fed
clarity. He writes: 'My unconscious early prose-it was largely
unconscious in those days because I thought the only way I could
write was to get drunk first-screens a predicament I struggled
desperately to steady at school] and continue to work forty years
later to resolve: how to calm and to rescue the lurching monster of
overwhelming, intractable, involuntary rage that my mother's
suicide, my father's neglect and my stepmother's violence installed
in me.' To judge from the simplicity with which he has woven his
memories into narrative, and from it constructed his identity, the
monster of rage has been laid to rest."--Christopher Lehmann-Haupt,
"New York Times."
""A Hole in the World" must be read through tears--the reader's
and the writer's--and it must be acknowledged as powerful a bearing
of witness, as dark a story of cruelty, as redemptive a
proclamation of the soul's strength as we have been given in a very
long time. Nothing by the prolific and talented Rhodes prepares us
for this shattering testimony."--Frederick Busch, "Los Angeles
Times."
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