A delightful romp that should appeal to those who appreciate the savvier realms of chick lit.
How successfully does the world of Jane Austen translate into Spanish? One intrepid author finds out in this travel memoir/literary exploration.
On sabbatical, Austen devotee Smith (Writing and Literature/Univ. of the Pacific) embarked on a project to discuss Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Emma with reading groups in Latin America. Displaying the good cheer and wry humor befitting an Austenite (as opposed to, say, an Emily Brontë or George Eliot enthusiast), she plunged into Spanish immersion classes in Guatemala, then set off for a romantic fling and the first of several reading adventures in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Smith was happy to discover that Austen’s genteel 19th-century English setting and formal narrative style proved to be relatable to her eager readers: Nearly all of them recognized their own lives in the plots and affirmed that issues of gender, class and familial obligation transcend era and locale. Smith ably captures the lively, often heated, tone of these literary gatherings and delves into the unique characteristics of each country, showcasing an Ecuadorean park teeming with iguanas, a multi-block stretch of Argentinean bookshops, and a tranquil Chilean monastery complete with its own on-site rooster. While the reading-group discussions tend to blur together by the end, Smith remains an engaging narrator throughout. A reader would need to possess either a truly cold heart or a pathological aversion to Austen to begrudge her the swoon-worthy happy ending to her tale.
A delightful romp that should appeal to those who appreciate the savvier realms of chick lit.Pub Date: June 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4022-6585-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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