by Alisa Valdes ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 7, 2013
A memoir for chick-lit fans who can stomach a bit of politics along with their romance.
A big-city girl finds loves where she least expects it and re-examines her life in the process.
Valdes (Puta, 2012, etc.) details her unexpected relationship with a conservative New Mexico cowboy. The author was recovering from a failed marriage and a stalled career when she reluctantly agreed to go on a first date with “The Cowboy.” What follows are the dramatic ups and downs of their passionate relationship. This memoir will appeal to Valdes’ fans, who will appreciate its self-deprecating, conversational tone and the tension between the two lovers. The Cowboy resembles a romance-novel stereotype: strong and handsome, self-sufficient and controlling. That Valdes fell passionately in love with this manly man won’t surprise many readers, but it worried the author, especially since the Cowboy insisted that she submit to him in various activities, like driving, ranching and sex. These worries led Valdes into therapy and a re-examination of the events of her childhood and the political beliefs of her family. Rather than just chalking it up to the irrational power of love, Valdes felt the need to justify this new relationship and her submissiveness with pop gender studies. She arrived at a dismissal of the early feminist theories that she was (sort of) raised with. Unfortunately, these sections divert readers from the more titillating story of the city girl/country boy romance. Much of Valdes’ research is undocumented, and the lack of a bibliography is troubling. It will no doubt, however, work to attract attention to and controversy for what would otherwise be a sweet but forgettable memoir.
A memoir for chick-lit fans who can stomach a bit of politics along with their romance.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-592-40790-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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