A Hole in the World
An American Boyhood
Tenth Anniversary Edition
With a new preface and epilogue
Richard Rhodes
April 2000
288 pages, 18 photographs, 6 x 9
Paper ISBN 978-0-7006-1038-9, $16.95 (t)
 When he first published A Hole
in the World in 1990, Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Rhodes
helped launch and legitimate a decade-long publishing phenomenon--the
memoir of abused childhood. In this tenth anniversary edition,
Rhodes offers new reflections on the abuse he and his older brother
endured at the hands of their terrorizing stepmother and negligent
father. He also describes readers' powerful and moving responses
to his book, considers his changing sentiments as the years have
passed, and provides additional details on his brother Stanley,
who remains the author's true hero in this moving memoir.
"Unlike too much of what is offered for public edification
(and titillation) in this our age of confession, A Hole in
the World comes straight from the heart with no apparent
self-serving motives. Richard Rhodes is here to tell us three
things, all of them important and useful. The first is that it
is dangerous and self-deluding to sentimentalize a myth of idyllic
American childhood. The second is that a child caught in a hell
not of his own making must devise strategies for survival and
must cry out for help; there are others, outsiders, ready to
provide it. The third--and to those caught in their own torment
the most important--is that it is possible to escape, to rise
above hurt and rage, to live a life that is useful and good.
A timely contribution to the literature of a problem we are only
beginning to understand."--Jonathan Yardley, Washington
Post
"The deepest significance of Rhodes's prose is its spring-fed
clarity. He writes: 'My unconscious early prose--it was largely
unconscious in those days because I thought the only way I could
write was to get drunk first--screens a predicament I struggled
desperately to steady at [school] and continue to work forty
years later to resolve: how to calm and to rescue the lurching
monster of overwhelming, intractable, involuntary rage that my
mother's suicide, my father's neglect and my stepmother's violence
installed in me.' To judge from the simplicity with which he
has woven his memories into narrative, and from it constructed
his identity, the monster of rage has been laid to rest."--Christopher
Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times
"A Hole in the World must be read through tears--the
reader's and the writer's--and it must be acknowledged as powerful
a bearing of witness, as dark a story of cruelty, as redemptive
a proclamation of the soul's strength as we have been given in
a very long time. Nothing by the prolific and talented Rhodes
prepares us for this shattering testimony."--Frederick
Busch, Los Angeles Times
"An important theme in Rhodes's massive, brilliantly
researched The Making of the Atomic Bomb is secrecy and
its corrupting, ultimately destructive effect on our lives. Not
surprisingly, this is also an important theme in A Hole in
the World. . . . His searing story is clearly meant to be
a kind of exorcism for him, an attempt to remember his past with
such painful clarity that denial, forgetfulness and emotional
displacement will no longer drive him into the mute language
of repetition."--Russell Banks in the New York
Times Book Review
"A powerful book. At a time when society is just beginning
to acknowledge the pervasive and lasting effects of child abuse,
the stalwart honesty of Rhodes's memoir provides a compelling
testimonial."--San Francisco Chronicle
RICHARD RHODES received both the National Book Award
and a Pulitzer Prize for The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
He is the author of Why They Kill and The
Inland Ground: An Evocation of the American Middle West.
He grew up in Kansas City and Independence, Missouri, and now
lives in Connecticut.
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