Fai clic su di un'immagine per andare a Google Ricerca Libri.
Sto caricando le informazioni... Kin: A Memoir (edizione 2021)di Shawna Kay Rodenberg (Autore)
Informazioni sull'operaKin: A Memoir di Shawna Kay Rodenberg
Anticipated 2021 Reads (160) Abuse, Grief, Loss (53) Sto caricando le informazioni...
Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. nessuna recensione | aggiungi una recensione
Premi e riconoscimenti
"A heart stopping memoir of a wrenching Appalachian girlhood and a multilayered portrait of a misrepresented people, from Rona Jaffe Writer's Award winner Shawna Kay Rodenberg. When Shawna Kay Rodenberg was four, her father, fresh from a ruinous tour in Vietnam, spirited her family from their home in the hills of Eastern Kentucky to Minnesota, renouncing all of their earthly possessions to live in the Body, an off-the-grid End Times religious community. Her father was seeking a better, safer life for his family, but the austere communal living of prayer, bible study and strict regimentation was a bad fit for the precocious Shawna. Disciplined harshly for her many infractions, she was sexually abused by a predatory adult member of the community. Soon after the leader of the Body died and revelations of the sexual abuse came to light, her family returned to the same Kentucky mountains that their ancestors have called home for three hundred years. It is a community ravaged by the coal industry, but for all that, rich in humanity, beauty, and the complex knots of family love. Curious, resourceful, rebellious, Shawna will ultimately leave her mountain home but only as she masters a perilous balancing act between who she has been and who she will become. Kin is a mesmerizing memoir of survival that seeks to understand and make peace with the people and places that were survived. It is above all about family-about the forgiveness and love within its bounds-and generations of Appalachians who have endured, harmed, and held each other through countless lifetimes of personal and regional tragedy"-- Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
Discussioni correntiNessunoCopertine popolari
Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)976.9092History and Geography North America South Central U.S. KentuckyClassificazione LCVotoMedia:
Sei tu?Diventa un autore di LibraryThing. |
The prologue of “Kin” sets the tone and lets the reader know that this is no “Hillbilly Elegy”—that Rodenberg intends to be fair to Appalachia and its people, without pulling any punches or sugarcoating the realities of the region, or of her troubled history.
In the prologue, Shauna Kay Rodenberg is headed home to Kentucky with a news crew as a kind of Appalachian consultant, and she is as wary as some of the new segment’s intended subjects will turn out to be, just as we have always been when it comes to media coverage, and with good reason.
Chapter One takes us to 1978, and from there, the reader moves around in time, focusing on different kinfolks and their stories, always going back to the author and her experiences and perspectives.
For those who grow up in Appalachia, there are no happily ever afters, only kinda-happily ever afters. You attempt to break the cycle while holding on to the beautiful, always feeling the pull of home. You may even have a rags to riches story, but some of the rags, and the bruises, are invisible.
Rodenberg writes brilliantly about being a woman with other people’s sins projected onto her (in addition to being constantly shamed for imaginary transgressions). This is a burden for women in religious societies worldwide. Her parents, particularly her father, veer between extremism and pure insanity on the religion spectrum, and her father passes along his feelings of inadequacy from his own father like a poisonous inheritance. Impossibly, love and faith survive.
Those of us who live here have been hoping for a memoir that would explain root causes of the suffering that makes so many in Appalachia turn to cults, or drugs, or politicians to relieve some of our pressure and pain. The author leaves out none of these root causes, whether we are talking about coal companies or grim poverty or multi-generational trauma. Nor does she omit any of Appalachia’s great strengths.
Some of the structure of “Kin” is spectacular: just when the reader is about to write off her father completely for the evils he has done, the very next chapter is his letters home from the Vietnam War. There is not a single portrait of Rodenberg’s kin that is not multifaceted, deep, and poignant.
I sometimes became confused about which relative was the focus of a chapter, but this is a minor flaw. This autobiography is as accomplished as it is astonishing. Written with respect and care, “Kin” stands among not only the best Appalachian memoirs ever written, but among the best American memoirs of recent times. ( )