My Name's Not Susie: A Life Transformed by Literacy [Hardcover]

Sharon Jean Hamilton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1995 | ISBN-10: 0867093617 | ISBN-13: 978-0867093612 | Edition: First Edition, #

This book poignantly traces the personal, ethical, and professional development of a child predicted to be dysfunctional.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Hamilton here tells how, through the liberation of literacy, she surmounted her cruel beginnings and is today a professor of English at Indiana-Purdue University. As a young girl, she was described by various caretakers as a "bad apple." In her tortured early childhood, wanted by neither her birth nor her foster parents, she was given to rages that frightened her as well as others. Hamilton recalls a defining moment when she was eight and at relative ease with a caring, adoptive mother. To channel the child's incessant chatter, her schoolteacher mother suggested that she write what she could remember from the years of living in foster homes and orphanages, where she was given different names. That exercise, and the stories read to her by her mother, not only became the basis for academic success but also provided coping strategies for a rocky adulthood. Hamilton's story is stark and troubling; it is also homage to the role of literacy in the evolution of the self.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 153 pages
• Publisher: Boynton/Cook Pub; First Edition, # edition (October 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0867093617
• ISBN-13: 978-0867093612
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,798,070 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a powerful book., April 4, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: My Name's Not Susie: A Life Transformed by Literacy (Hardcover)

Anyone who feels that literacy has changed their life should read this book. The author
tells of her heart-wrenching, lonely existence as an abused child who was shuttled from
one foster home to another until she was adopted by a woman who opened her eyes to the
world of reading. The author was able to overcome her less than auspicious beginning
to become a professor of English at IUPUI. This story could have been told
with much melodrama, but the author tells it in an extremely honest manner and lets the
drama of the story come through naturally. She does not beg for sympathy for the
circumstances of her childhood. She simply tells the readers how literacy brought her
out of a miserable existence and makes a connection with her readers that will, at least
for this reader, last forever.