Monday, April 3rd, 2023, 7pm ET. Virtual event, RSVP required: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/598043422977
Did you miss this event? You can watch the event recording on the Gibson's Bookstore Youtube Channel: https://youtu.be/7KQTog6QPaQ
Award-winning journalist and author Christine Kenneally visits America and Gibson's Bookstore to present the tragic and shocking secret history of twentieth-century orphanages—which for decades hid violence, abuse, and deaths within their walls, in her new book, Ghosts of the Orphanage: A Story of Mysterious Deaths, a Conspiracy of Silence, and a Search for Justice.
For much of the twentieth century, a series of terrible events—abuse, both physical and psychological, and even deaths—took places inside orphanages. The survivors have been trying to tell their astonishing stories for a long time, but disbelief, secrecy, and trauma have kept them from breaking through. For ten years, Christine Kenneally has been on a quest to uncover the harrowing truth.
Centering her story on St. Joseph’s, a Catholic orphanage in Vermont, Kenneally has written a stunning account of a series of crimes and abuses. But her work is not confined to one place. Following clues that take her into the darkened corners of several institutions across the globe, she finds a trail of terrifying stories and a courageous group of survivors who are seeking justice. Ghosts of the Orphanage is an incredible true crime story and a reckoning with a past that has stayed buried for too long, with tragic consequences.
About the author: Christine Kenneally is an award-winning journalist and author who has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate, Time, and other publications. Her BuzzFeed story about crimes committed at St. Joseph's Orphanage was viewed more than six million times in six months. It won a Deadline Award and was a finalist for a National Magazine Award, a Michael Kelly Award and an Online Journalism Award. It was shortlisted for the Fetisov Prize. Her most recent book, The Invisible History of the Human Race was a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, among other accolades. A native of Australia, Kenneally also has lived in New York, Iowa, and England, where she earned a Ph.D. in linguistics from Cambridge University. She lives in Melbourne, Australia with her family.
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The shocking secret history of twentieth-century orphanages—which for decades hid violence, abuse, and deaths within their walls
For much of the twentieth century, a series of terrible events—abuse, both physical and psychological, and even deaths—took places inside orphanages.