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 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

'The deepest significance of Rhodes’s prose is its spring-fed clarity. A timely contribution to the literature of a problem we are only beginning to understand.'- Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post. 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.

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 first is that it is dangerous and self-deluding to sentimentalize a myth of idyllic American childhood. Richard Rhodes is here to tell us three things, all of them important and useful. '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.

A hole in the world richard rhodes