Real Men Read: ‘Met the End’ by Holly Brians Ragusa

Thursday, October 26, 2023
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

About the Book

Met the End, a true-crime survival memoir, explores the life and death of John Powell, first known victim of American serial killer Donald Harvey, through the eyes of Powell’s daughter, Holly Brians Ragusa. When a motorcycle accident in 1986 left Powell in a coma, the nightmare for Brians Ragusa and her family had scarcely begun: Harvey, a nurse’s aid, was poisoning him with cyanide, and when Powell died, an investigation revealed dozens of similar crimes.

For Brians Ragusa, fifteen years old at the time, the incident had profound mental and emotional consequences. She struggled for decades to reconcile childhood memories of her dad against the sensational publicity surrounding his murder. Then, in 2017, the national spotlight returned to Harvey’s case when a fellow prison inmate beat him to death. Rekindled trauma from the news coverage drove Brians Ragusa to finally tell her father’s story. Through research, interviews, and introspection, Brians Ragusa faces the tragedy of her family’s past, and finds reclamation.

About the Author

Holly Brians Ragusa is an interdisciplinary writer, speaker, and community activist based in Cincinnati. Author of Met the End, Dying to Know Myself in Time, and Inverse: Informed Thoughts by an Unfit Poet, and a poet and opinion contributor to the Cincinnati Enquirer.

About the event

Real Men Read meets on the fourth Thursday of every month at 7:00 pm in our Cold Spring branch meeting room. We read various fiction titles ranging from classics to modern sci-fi, as well as non-fiction including history, biography, and popular science.

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Please note any accommodation requests in the Special Need section of the registration form. If you wish to attend via Zoom, or have any other questions, please contact Dave Anderson at danderson@cc-pl.org

Cold Spring Branch