A Very Private School
A Memoir
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
“A tour de force.” —The Washington Post
In this poignant memoir, Charles Spencer recounts the trauma of being sent away from home at age eight to attend boarding school.
A Very Private School offers a clear-eyed, first-hand account of a culture of cruelty at the school Charles Spencer attended in his youth and provides important insights into an antiquated boarding system. Drawing on the memories of many of his schoolboy contemporaries, as well as his own letters and diaries from the time, he reflects on the hopelessness and abandonment he felt at aged eight, viscerally describing the intense pain of homesickness and the appalling inescapability of it all. Exploring the long-lasting impact of his experiences, Spencer presents a candid reckoning with his past and a reclamation of his childhood.
Customer Reviews
Tragic
This is the saddest thing I have ever read. That school is still in operation. It should be closed. Turned into a museum to akin to Auschwitz.
Brave and insightful
There are many generations of children, male and female who lived through child traumatic experiences like this both at school and at home. Unfortunately there were snd still are monsters to prey upon innocent children to satisfy their jealousy, lusts, or are repeating behaviors played out on them as they grew.
It’s a good thing we now talk to our children at a younger age about their rights to protect themselves and identify adults with bad intentions towards them.
The world is more complicated than it ever has been but there are more laws in place and kids are better equipped to guard against bullies, predatory teachers and even parents who abuse innocent children.
Thank you for writing this book. Just because you came from privilege does not protect you from things like those Kids all over the world in foster homes, orphanages, broken homes have dealt with this. Predators are every where and set up systems and mini s to serve them so they can persist in their evil acts.
It’s up to us to protect our children. We can no longer use as an excuse that it’s someone else’s responsibility to protect our kids. It’s ours first. We live in an evil world. New technology just makes it easier to protect the criminals and cater to those with perversions.
I wonder if these things still go on today? Probably so.
A Very Private School
Class shattering and painfully human… In sharing his story, Spencer is both extremely vulnerable and superbly courageous. The language of abuse and its aftermath is universal.