Poster Child
By Emily Rapp
Bloomsbury, 229 pages, $23.95
As a March of Dimes poster child, Emily Rapp was the image of a bright, carefree child who refused to let her disability get in the way of running, jumping and playing like the other kids. In “Poster Child,” Rapp, born with a condition that required her left foot be amputated at age 4, shows readers the real person behind that image, and how the attention and approval she received created a need to be seen as so extraordinary that her prosthetic leg would fade into the background.
“People told me, ‘You’re such an inspiration,’ and, ‘You’re so brave,’ ” Rapp writes. “I believed them. I thought that as long as I was inspiring and fantastic, as long as I compensated for the missing leg by being smart, cute, intelligent, and fun, I would have a normal life. . . . I even thought, for a long time, that it would be easy.”
Word lovers will find pleasure in “Poster Child,” even when the subject matter is far from beautiful. Rapp has a gift with language and finds fresh ways to describe common feelings of rejection and shame. A schoolmate who calls her crippled makes her feel “as though the air had collapsed around my face and become strange and ugly,” as though she is wearing “a crinkly, cripple hat.”
More than anything, Rapp wants to pass as “normal,” and anyone who has hidden parts of themselves to gain acceptance will recognize her struggle and the costs it demands. Rapp doesn’t sugarcoat ugly thoughts and actions: her lack of compassion in her push to be popular, an obsession with appearance that becomes an eating disorder, a mangled self-image that makes her feel unlovable as she racks up more awards and achievements.
Eventually her perfectionist facade cracks, and she starts a journey toward self-knowledge and acceptance that isn’t over when the book ends. Rapp doesn’t wrap her story in a neat narrative of disabled person courageously overcoming obstacles to triumph. Readers get a portrait of a real person with flaws, one who challenges herself and us to examine the way we view our bodies and their limitations.
Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea’s Prisons
By Cullen Thomas
Viking, 347 pages, $24.95
Cullen Thomas’ “Brother One Cell” offers a cautionary tale to Americans traveling abroad: if you willingly break the law in another country, your nationality does not provide a get-out-of-jail-free card.
That’s not the main point Thomas tries to make in “Brother One Cell,” his memoir of 31/2 years in a South Korean prison, but it hangs heavy over the book. Thomas is not a man wrongly imprisoned; he’s a 23-year-old who thought smuggling hashish into Korea from the Philippines would simply be a new chapter in his post-college Asian adventure. When Korean police catch him, Thomas is surprised to learn that the laws of the country apply to him and that doing something illegal just for kicks is as punishable as crimes done for malevolent purposes.
Thomas comes off in these early scenes as arrogant and shockingly naive. But once readers get past the fact that Thomas made an incredibly stupid decision — and he’s adult enough to admit it — “Brother One Cell” opens itself up to a deeper story of friendship, remorse and keeping the soul alive when the body is behind bars.
Thomas reads philosophy and writes, first on hidden scraps of paper, then in journals he sends home. He makes friends with the other foreign prisoners and finds small joys in basketball and work. He struggles with isolation and depression, which threatens to overwhelm him.
The writing is uneven in places; literary references mix with frat-house slang. Still, his experience is compelling enough to keep readers going to the end, to see what happens when Thomas gets out and what he learns along the way.
Thick as Thieves: A Brother, a Sister — A True Story of Two Turbulent Lives
By Steve Geng
Holt, 292 pages, $24
Toward the end of “Thick as Thieves,” Steve Geng makes his intention for writing clear: “You only get one family in a lifetime, and if you don’t make an effort to know and love them, the legacy of their stories vanishes with them.”
Geng’s sister was Veronica Geng, a writer and influential fiction editor at The New Yorker magazine who made her name with her sharp humor pieces. Geng’s effort to know her comes too late for her to appreciate it: She died of a brain tumor in 1997. At the time, she and Steve, who struggled for years with a life of crime and drug addiction, were estranged. Geng didn’t even know his sister, his only sibling and surviving family member, was sick. “Thick as Thieves” is his attempt to make amends.
Through interviews with her friends and fellow writers, Geng reconstructs his sister’s literary life, including the pleasure she got from writing and the pain (including thrown typewriters) she inflicted on editors who dared touch her work. Geng brings her to life on the page through those stories and with his own memories of growing up together, in awe of her brilliance and drive. “I loved just being around her,” Geng writes. “We all did. She was our hope for a family success story.”
If she is the family success story, he is the black sheep. He’s drawn to a life of stealing to finance a drug habit and is in and out of jail. More than once he pulls his life together — including a stint as an actor on TV’s “Miami Vice” — but the drugs and fast money from stealing are a lure he can’t resist.
Geng eventually conquers his demons — his well-written and affecting memoir is tangible proof — but it’s too late to repair the rift with his sister. It’s a shame, because she would have been pleased to know he finally went legit, and because Geng’s love and respect for her, even when he and she weren’t speaking, is apparent on every page of his book.
Rainbow’s End: A Memoir of Childhood, War and an African Farm
By Lauren St. John
Scribner, 269 pages, $25
Lauren St. John has packed “Rainbow’s End” with so much of Africa’s sights, smells and sounds that the place — beloved, beautiful and troubled — practically seeps from its pages.
This is the story of St. John’s childhood in Rhodesia, a rogue country that, after UN sanctions and a civil war, became Zimbabwe. St. John and her family were on the wrong side of the war — white farmers fighting for a country where the white minority held power over the black majority — but from a young child’s perspective, the fight was framed in simpler terms. It was about defending a beloved country, coming together with neighbors to sing patriotic songs and protecting farms from the guerrilla fighters leading the uprising.
The war becomes more real and serious for St. John when guerrillas ambush the home of a schoolmate, 11, killing him, his father, grandmother and a friend. When the rest of the family abandons the farm, Rainbow’s End, St. John and her family move in. And despite the terrible thing that preceded them, the new occupants revel in the nature and space of the 1,000-acre farm.
It’s not the only contradiction in St. John’s tale. Her ideas about the war are contradicted when the black majority wins independence and a teenage St. John sees that it was the black Africans fighting for freedom and that she had viewed them as second-class citizens not worthy of full rights.
“The sense of disillusionment I felt was total,” she writes. “The country I had loved so much that at times I almost wished I could die for it was not the country I had thought it was.”
“Rainbow’s End” is a moving exploration of war, death and loss of innocence. At the same time she takes on these weighty topics, St. John deftly handles the smaller moments that make up an individual life. In her descriptions of family life on Rainbow’s End and the African landscape, St. John gives readers a sense of why, despite the blood and violence and disillusionment, Africa still has such a powerful pull.
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Kathryn Masterson, a former staff reporter for the Tribune’s RedEye edition, is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.
