A hilarious and touching coming-of-age story that will strike a particular nerve among Generation Y.
The former MTV VJ waxes nostalgic on his life in pop culture.
Writer, comedian, and TV personality Holmes, a writer-at-large for Esquire.com, is probably best known as the runner-up of MTV’s first Wanna Be a VJ contest, a competition he lost to the dervish known as Jesse Camp. The loss to Camp, which the author hilariously recounts with candid remarks about the victor, was a pivotal moment in Holmes’ life. He still earned a spot on MTV as an on-air personality, and the new career eventually led to a greater sense of self-acceptance that had eluded him his whole life. As a self-proclaimed outsider, Holmes’ burgeoning homosexuality as a teenager didn’t help his self-image considering his conservative upbringing in the Catholic community of suburban St. Louis. To help him cope, Holmes turned to pop culture. A cultural omnivore, he devoured the music his older brothers brought home from college, sang Top 40 songs with his parents, and watched a lot of TV. It wasn’t until a chance meeting with Amy and Emily of the Indigo Girls in his final year of college that Holmes finally received the advice he’d been longing for to help him come out: just trust yourself. Though Holmes peppers his narrative with witty asides and pop-culture references, the nostalgia factor is ramped up in the interludes between chapters, in which he provides a soundtrack for the current moment, a list of hunks that defined his adolescence, and the top 10 videos that defined MTV’s Total Request Live. One such aside is an amusing run-down of gossipy anecdotes of millennium-era pop stars and celebrities, featuring Kid Rock, Tara Reid, Puff Daddy, and more. Holmes is all charm, and his self-deprecating style makes his story relatable and engaging without feeling self-involved.
A hilarious and touching coming-of-age story that will strike a particular nerve among Generation Y.Pub Date: June 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8041-8798-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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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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