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Denial: A Memoir Of Terror (2010)

by Jessica Stern(Favorite Author)

3.63 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0061626651 (ISBN13: 9780061626654)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Ecco

review 1: Poor writing style, sounded more like something a teenager would write. I suppose it is a memoir, but I still hated the writing style. At times the author comes off as arrogant ("I'd like to see you try getting through what I got through. I'd like to see how long you could stand, how long you could sustain both sanity and humanity"), other times childish and immature.I only finished it in a day to get it over and done with, not because it was an interesting read.
review 2: This book reads more like a true crime book than a memoir. The author was raped when she was a teenager. The author investigates all the people who knew her rapist, in order to gain an understanding of what kind of man he was. He was a charming psychopath, smart, well dressed, often with a s... moremile on his face. Along the way she also talks about her family's experiences in Nazi German, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), the failure of the Roman Catholic Church to prosecute pedophile rings of priests, iatrogeny, and the cycle of abuse. She points out that the vast majority of women who have been abused do not abuse others, so there must be more to evil than just the cycle of abuse. The author tried to discover what kind of childhood trauma might have caused her rapist to become a rapist. She could not find much. There was no evidence that her rapist had been molested by a priest. The worst thing that had happened in his childhood was that he was raised by his aunt, his mother's sister, instead of by his mother. Beethoven was repeatedly beaten by his drunken father, and subsequently became deaf. But Beethoven did not turn into a rapist. My personal opinion is that a person's moral character is only partially determined by heredity and environment. It has never been scientifically proven (or disproven) that heredity and environment completely determine human nature. When science cannot provide answers, we should fall back on common sense, which says that human beings have free will. less

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