Summary: A well-written, hopeful but realistic look at people trying to make a difference.
Really, this is the last book on the opioid crisis, I promise! This recent book from Beth Macy, about people working to solve the opioid crisis, is actually the book that prompted me to finally get to all the related books on my to-read list.
I found this look at people doing their best to be largely optimistic, despite the infuriating lack of systemic support for proven solutions in the US. There are people working outside the system to get people help now. There are people working within the system, to change community perspectives and how the criminal justice system functions. All of these endeavors seemed like they were making a difference. It was also clear that, due to lack of systemic support, the people who are trying to help are doing so by burning themselves out. It’s simply not a problem that can be solved solely by individuals.
As with Macy’s Dopesick, the author does a great job drawing the reader into the stories of individuals. We join the author in getting to know people struggling with opioid use disorder and people trying to help them. Unlike the author’s previous book, this was as in-depth as I wanted. I felt like I was getting a complete picture of the communities she described. As a book focused on solutions, I’m glad this is the book I finished up with and it’s definitely one I’d recommend.
Greetings Freelancers, this could potentially be worth a read.
Review by Ariel M. Goldenthal
Dominic Bucca’s Faculty Brat: A Memoir of Abuse is the winner of the 2019 Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction (University of Iowa Press, 2020). The memoir is broken into three sections, each carrying the title of a different last name that Bucca took in his journey for justice. Rather than a simple observer, Bucca asks the reader to immerse themselves in each of these three stages of his life.
In Faculty Brat, Dominic Bucca recounts thirty years of life shaped by the sexual abuse that he suffered at the hands of his stepfather. The sexual abuse is compounded by years of verbal abuse that continue even after Bucca moves to live with his biological father’s family. Slowly, the cracks from the abuse turn to breaks in his family and the legal system, revealed when he finally decides to tell his mother and sisters the truth. And long after the abuse itself ends, the dissociation remains, evident in Bucca’s decision to distance himself from his past by referring to himself as “the boy.”
The strength of this work is Bucca’s specificity—an all-too-common tale of abuse shaped into a unique and courageous memoir. The specificity reaches from the memoir’s structure to its language and stylistic choices. Each section of Faculty Brat begins with an aptly titled, “Orientation,” that tells the reader which role they will be playing for those pages. The title of “Orientation” plays on themes of college welcome weeks, but instead sets the reader in the specific context of the memoir: not only a preparatory school, but one of the most prestigious preparatory schools in the nation; not only a child, but the child of a teacher at the school—a faculty brat.
The first “Orientation” chapter tells the reader to “imagine you are the single mother of a toddler,” and gives us just enough detail to inhabit that woman’s life with her young son before the turn. The chapter ends with, “Now, remember your boy.” The suddenness of the switch allows the reader to sink into the role of the mother just long enough to forget, as she seems to do at times, about that son.
Throughout Faculty Brat, Bucca employs turns in the plot, and in the language itself, to remind the reader that nothing is ever what it seems. The “you” of the first chapter shifts from the mother to a powerless observer, and finally to the author himself; mirroring the separation and emotional transformation that Bucca endured.
Bucca balances the devastating darkness of his story with emotionally open language that draws the reader into his world and holds them there, even in the deepest moments of despair.
“You’ve finally found at least some of that unnamable strength, the opposite of a lifetime of silence, finally managed to access your anger, finally found the proper outlet for Gozer, that frighteningly strong, self-righteous part of yourself, the subversive keeper of all your rage.”
In a memoir of growth and the struggle for power and control, it is the hurt and angry part of Bucca that finally succeeds in sharing the truth of his stepfather’s abuse. Faculty Brat: A Memoir of Abuse is more than what the title suggests: It is a story of strength and quiet hope, expertly drawn and beautifully told.
Ariel M. Goldenthal is an assistant professor of English at George Mason University, where she also received her MFA in fiction. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Grace in Darkness; An Anthology of D.C. Women Writers, Fiction Southeast, and Flash Fiction Magazine, and has received an Honorable Mention from Glimmer Train.
Title: All the Kremlin’s Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin Author: Mikhail ZygarSource: Library Links: Bookshop (affiliate link) |Goodreads…
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