Half the house : a memoir /

Baby boomer Richard suffered for decades in secret shame from being sexually molested by a local baseball coach, which he unloads in an intense catharsis with his father. The secret merely climaxes all the silences and resentments that Richard had harbored about his dad, although he still respects him. Powerfully articulated emotion with wide resonance about the most important man in any man's life. stemmed from paternal brilliance in nuclear physics: Segre pere helped design the first atom bomb and shared the Nobel Prize for discovering the antiproton. Claudio's life, foreordained as a search to shed the son-of prefix, took an independent direction--into journalism, then history writing, and teaching--and his life generally displays a divergence from his famous father's attitudes, which regarding his son settled somewhere between skepticism and plain inattention. But all Claudio ever wanted was his father's sincere pride in his son's nonscientific accomplishments; their climactic confrontation may not have conferred that, but it does, coming off Claudio's fluid pen, describe what many men feel when they summon the courage to say, "Dad, we've got to talk." --Gilbert Taylor

Poet Hoffman's memoir of a childhood in which he was sexually assaulted by his sports coach led to the arrest and recent conviction of the man responsible. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Hoffman's work has appeared in literary journals such as the Hudson Review, Kansas Quarterly, and Shenandoah; he currently works at a health clinic. His childhood, which he recounts in this memoir, was shattered by the deaths of two young brothers with muscular distrophy, abuse from his father, and sexual molestation by a coach. For a period, Hoffman himself turned to alcohol and drugs. His memoir is ultimately a story of love, reconciliation, and triumph over adversity. Hoffman's spare style makes his story all the more affecting, as he skillfully interweaves the beautiful and ugly details of growing up in a working-class family in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Returning home to confront his father, Hoffman writes, "I was shrinking....I felt a split-second shock that my feet reached the floor." In the end, he does become a man, reconciles with his father, and brings his own children to visit. His memoir will be of interest to public libraries as well as to some academic and special ones.‘Nancy Shires, East Carolina Univ., Greenville, N.C. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

This memoir is most effective when it recounts the horrors of a childhood of fear, sexual abuse, and the illness and death of siblings. Hoffman grew up in the 1950s in Allentown, Penn., where his father worked at a variety of blue-collar jobs. His recollection of his childhood carefully avoids adult retrospective analysis. Thus, when younger brothers Mike and Bob are stricken with muscular dystrophy, it is recounted with a 10-year-old's perspective and grasp of the medical arcana. Both boys were wheelchair-bound, and the family's resources and attention were completely devoted to them. Hoffman's father installed ramps and renovated a downstairs room, rigging ``an ugly cast-iron derrick which transferred [them] from bed to wheelchair to commode.'' Frustrated, and given to drink, the father would rage and weep: ``He was the man I loved and the man I feared,'' writes the author. When his baseball coach, who lured him with his collection of pornographic comic books, repeatedly sodomized him, Hoffman was afraid to tell his father. He recalls gnawing on his arm until it bruised, chasing away the sexual visions conjured by his confused little boy's imagination. In 1990, five years after his mother's death, Hoffman, who had battled drugs and drink, returned home to tell his father about the baseball coach and to explain how much hurt and anger and fear his father's whippings and inattention had caused. Hoffman brandishes a metal spatula similar to the one he'd been spanked with. After his father admits pushing away memories of the two sons who have died, Hoffman waves a picture of himself at the crying man: ``What about this boy? . . . Do you remember him?'' A wonderfully written and heart-wrenchingly sad debut. But the timing and self-serving nature of the confrontation with his father seems merely cruel and has all the logic and cathartic profundity of a 10-minute segment with Oprah or Geraldo.