Trying to Get Some Dignity: Stories of Triumph over Childhood Abuse

by Richard Rhodes, Richard Rhodes

Trying to Get Some Stories of Triumph Over Childhood Abuse evolved from Richard Rhodes's memoir, A Hole in the An American Boyhood , in which he told of the abuse he endured at the hands of his stepmother. Here is an oral history of child abuse--physical, mental, and sexual--and how its survivors dealt with it. While talking with victims of abuse, the authors found that "each strategy [for survival] was original, imaginative, off the books, a tribute to the canny resilience of the human spirit. Collectively, like breathtaking third-act reversals, they promised to lift the narrative from one of pain to one of triumph." Trying to Get Some Dignity will reaffirm readers' faith in their ability to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles in their own lives.

368 pages, Paperback

First published August 5, 1998

About the author

Richard Lee Rhodes is an American journalist, historian, and author of both fiction and non-fiction (which he prefers to call "verity"), including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), and most recently, Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (2007). He has been awarded grants from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation among others.

He is an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He also frequently gives lectures and talks on a broad range of subjects to various audiences, including testifying before the U.S. Senate on nuclear energy.