by Chris Perez ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 3, 2012
A straightforward but mostly moving valentine to young love that will appeal to romantics and fans of Latin music.
The widower of murdered pop star Selena reveals poignant details of their short time together as a couple.
In the early 1990s, Selena Quintanilla shook up the world of Tejano, a hybrid of Mexican and American music, by fronting an energetic young band that included guitarist Chris Perez. Initially more interested in Selena’s strong voice and the band’s innovative take on tradition than in romance, Perez soon found himself falling head over heels for Selena. Perez portrays his girlfriend and eventual wife—they eloped in 1992 after growing weary of concealing their relationship from Selena’s overly protective father—as a spirited daredevil with a heart of gold. She was an animal lover, motorcycle enthusiast and emerging fashion designer whose religious beliefs grounded her within the chaotic music industry. Unfortunately, Selena’s trusting nature led her to welcome a dangerous woman, Yolanda Saldivar, into her inner circle. As Selena’s fan-club president and personal assistant, Saldivar soon proved to be unstable, manipulative and larcenous. Perez calls her a “cancer,” an epithet that would turn out to be tragically apt when Saldivar killed Selena in 1995, shooting her in the back and causing internal bleeding. Recounting the day that Selena died as well as the ensuing funeral, Perez captures these events in heartbreaking detail. At one point, he writes, he wanted nothing more than to crawl into the coffin with her and pull down the lid. Given Perez’s easygoing, confidential tone throughout the book, this image carries an emotional weight that it would not have had coming from a melodramatic storyteller. The ending of the book feels somewhat rushed, though, as Perez duly notes his descent into depression and substance abuse, his rebound and his eventual remarriage and fatherhood.
A straightforward but mostly moving valentine to young love that will appeal to romantics and fans of Latin music.Pub Date: April 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-451-41404-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celebra/Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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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