James E. Lytle

Inside the Mind of a Rape Victim

Revisado: 03-17-24

the way that the story is told through the mouths of people who were told the story by the person who lived through the experience, as well as through the mouth of the rape offers the reader/listener some insight into the chaos that a person who has lived through a rape must experience in the immediate aftermath of the experience. Louis' style here is similar to his style in "The Last of Eddy, so nothing new there, but one understands that one is hearing from a more mature young man and that is interesting. I felt the memoir was just the right length, but the ending of the piece seemed abrupt,

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I learned something

Revisado: 12-01-23

This is an extended advice column, that mostly rings the right bells; but in the end it's an extended advice column.

Having never known any Bi men closely, I learned a lot here, so that made the book useful to me; but I think it could have been half as long, and I would have finished it with just as much knowledge and understanding.

The author reads, and I really appreciated his absolute refusal to abandon his embrace of being a slut. That sort of honest self-acceptance is an antidote to all the sex-negative crap going down all over the world.

So if you are in the mood for a series of advice colums, arranged artfully and well written, check this one out, and lets see if we can get it into every library in the US; but for me it went on a good bit too long.

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Shuggie Bain Is As Good As All the Hype

Revisado: 05-16-21

The novel is good, maybe even great. As an audiobook, it's magical. Angus King's ability to inhabit all the characters in this family saga is absolute; and since each of the characters is drawn so thoroughly and succinctly by Douglas Stuart, in this audiobook one is able to enjoy getting to know, and if not love at least understand, each of the many characters in this book. As many reviewers for "important" publicatons have said, the characters in Shuggie Bain are as well drawn as are those in a Dickens Novel.

As I listened to the narration, I kept being reminded of "Grapes of Wrath," despite the fact that while Shuggie moves a few times over the course of the novel, the Joads cross half the North American Continent. But then again, maybe that's indicative of how differently Americans and Scots view landscapes.

More importantly, in Shuggies tale, he is moved about by his alchoholic mother, whose frustration with her lot in life is truly the bain of the entire families existence; but still, one could argue that Agnes' frustration with her lack of social standing result from the fact that she and her family have been discarded, like many, many, many others, by the inhumane government run by Margaret Thatcher and her cronies.

In telling the story of little Shuggie, Stuart lets us know just how true it is when we hear that Thatcherism was unforgiving and demoralizing for huge numbers of people, and despite the fact that almost everyone gets out of the story alive, none are left untraumatized. And we all know that traumatized people pass on their trauma to their successor generations, sometimes ad infinitum, until the traumas are addressed.

Douglas Stuart got out of Scotland, and ultimately wrote this beautiful novel, but after listening to the last few moments of this audibook, one is left with the sense that even he has not fully healed from the traumas out of which this novel sprang.

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