by Chelsea Handler ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2005
It might work as standup, but when transferred to the page this shtick is a groaner.
Disjointed, lackluster musings on her promiscuous social life, by directionless if cheerful Handler.
The L.A.–based standup comic here relates the meandering story of her many sexual misadventures. She starts with a not-very-amusing incident: at six years old, she was persuaded by her sister to take a picture of her parents having sex. (Dad was pissed: imagine that.) Moving on to her teenaged adventures at the Jersey shore, Handler invites us to find it hilarious that she picked up a good-looking man, had sex with him immediately, and dated him for months despite the fact that she couldn’t stand talking to him. The joke in the next section is that while her father was a racist, she personally dated a wonderful black man, and it inspired her to want to sleep with many more of them. Next comes what’s supposed to be an entertaining misunderstanding involving her sisters and the fact that Handler did not in fact have sex with the naked midget they found in her hotel room. In one genuinely funny moment, the author was dismayed to find that the handsome stripper she picked up wanted to tell her his real name and discuss the fact that what he really wanted to do was act—it figures that she would get stuck with the guy who wanted a real relationship. There is more: the one-night stand who showed up at the restaurant where she worked and was seated in her section, with his girlfriend (Handler pretends she is her own identical twin and has never seen him before); the friend who plays a practical joke on her by telling Handler’s date that she has a terminal disease and just wants to cuddle; the gay friend invited to be her date for a wedding who terrorized her family.
It might work as standup, but when transferred to the page this shtick is a groaner.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-618-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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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