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Snapshots from my Uneventful Life

The funny bits in this Everyman’s true-life stories will remind readers to look on the bright side of life.

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Debut author Aboulafia highlights absurd and memorable events from his life in humorous autobiographical essays.

The author writes that he envisions memory as a series of still images strung together, and his strategy in this episodic memoir is to provide back stories for those snapshots. One of his first memories of growing up in the Bronx is a moment of disappointment when he fell and crushed a school diorama project. Many of the scenes that follow are more lighthearted, though, with good comic setups and patter. “Soft Ball,” one of the most tightly constructed narratives, relies on the title’s double meaning: while playing softball, the author was hit in the nether regions and endured days of internal bleeding and swelling. Doctors suggested that he might need a testicle removed; luckily, he sought another opinion and avoided surgery. Later pieces echo previous ones in satisfying ways; for example, the sports theme returns in an essay about the author’s father’s forged baseball autographs, while anatomical jesting resumes in a story about picking up his dog from a neutering. In chatty, self-deprecating prose, Aboulafia shakes his head at his youthful high jinks. He realizes how lucky he is that his recklessness never turned out worse; at various points, for example, he ate six moldy Devil Dogs while engrossed in a horror film, ran out of gas on a freezing night in Maine, and had a sewer cover fly toward him on the Long Island Expressway. Even in his adult life, haplessness followed his family: a honeymoon mudslide, an ill-fated kayaking trip, food poisoning, and so on. Although Aboulafia generally plays the clown, one of the best pieces, “Revelation,” is a serious one in which a scrap of shell he spots on a gloomy beach walk restores his sense of wonder: “We can forget that we are blessed with the good things in our lives and that we are surrounded, everywhere, by the divine music of this world. It is there for those of us who choose to hear.”

The funny bits in this Everyman’s true-life stories will remind readers to look on the bright side of life.

Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2015

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Library Tales Publishing

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

NOTES ON THE FIRST 150 YEARS IN AMERICA

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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