"Rearviewmirror," with its Police-style drumming and guitar riff, is testimony from someone who survived beatings and more: "I tried to endure what I could not forgive."

He had survived starvation, beatings, and sleeping in the gutter in the dead of winter.

He glimpsed several huge people -some with remarkably swollen faces, as if they'd lived half their lives underwater or had survived incredible beatings; all with wide, friendly smiles, which contradicted the untold viciousness of the dogs barking in such a frenzy at Homer's back.

To many, Ms. Braun is a defiant Everywoman whose image is only enhanced by revelations that she survived beatings by her policeman father, a divorce and the death of a brother from drugs and alcohol.

He survived brutal beatings, a lack of medical facilities and a starvation diet.

After years of living in fear, surviving torturous beatings and eating out of garbage cans, I now know I will somehow survive.

"It's a throwback that brings back memories of what I'd like to think is a bygone era," said Representative John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat who survived beatings and bombings as a civil rights worker in the 1960's.

When you get right down to it, Anthony Candell earned his high school diploma by taking shrapnel from a bomb blast and then surviving beatings and threats of execution while a prisoner of war for five months in Leipzig, Germany.

At 37, he may seem brittle - considering injuries have cost him five full games this season and parts of three others - but he has survived beatings ever since his childhood days playing a game called "Smear."

He survived beatings and was released from jail upon Joseph Stalin's death in 1953.