by Brooke Berman ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 8, 2010
A candid remembrance that fails as a compelling narrative.
Peripatetic adventures of a struggling young artist.
Celebrated playwright Berman (Hunting and Gathering, 2008, etc.) recounts her early years in New York City seeking the artist’s life, love and suitable lodgings. Student dorms, sublets, roach-infested walk-ups, parentally-funded “princess” apartments, couch surfing—the author explored seemingly every permutation of New York real estate as she pursued a classic bohemian existence as a fledgling performer and writer. As the product of a complicated home life, Berman’s rootlessness was spiritual as well as physical, and much of the author’s self-analysis is couched in New Age terms, with much emphasis on “healing” and “light.” Chronically broke, she still managed to find funds for various metaphysical advisors, who counseled her to burn sage in a new living space and consult a Tarot card reader, ostensibly ludicrous advice that perhaps seemed worthwhile in the savage trenches of the Manhattan apartment market. Real darkness enters Berman’s memoir in the forms of a traumatic rape that left the author sleepless and paralyzed with fear, and a boyfriend institutionalized for mental illness. She rallied, however, juggling multiple jobs, a diffident younger boyfriend and constant housing crises as she made headway in the theater scene and, triumphantly, was finally invited to join Juilliard’s prestigious drama program. Readers will applaud Berman’s pluck, but the litany of troublesome roommates, petty arguments, quotidian hassles, artists’ workshops and retreats and self-pitying maternal phone calls becomes tedious, as do the author’s monumental self-absorption and devotion to dubious spiritual pursuits. Berman certainly struggled to reach a measure of security and success, but the struggle was a rather ordinary one, untransformed here by the dramatist’s art.
A candid remembrance that fails as a compelling narrative.Pub Date: June 8, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-58842-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
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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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