An irreverent, savvy and sharp memoir.
Political reporter Andrews assembles 16 autobiographical essays exploring her unconventional upbringing, academic and professional accomplishment and the challenges of being a successful, single black woman in Washington, D.C.
The scathingly witty author examines a wide variety of topics that, beneath the jokes and sarcasm, address weighty issues (depression, aging, abortion) with wry astuteness. The “bitch” referred to in the title is an allusion to the tough veneer—perhaps subtly survivalist—that Andrews claims is necessary for a black woman who is often the only black woman in school or at work. She reveals the inception of this façade in chapters about her childhood, where she describes being the only child of an openly gay single mother whose eccentricities were both fascinating and impenetrable. One anecdote describes the author’s abduction by her grandmother at age six, in a misguided attempt to protect her; another details her attempt to reconcile the Bible with her mother’s homosexuality (she couldn’t). Whatever the effect of these profound incidents, the author clearly inherited ambition and confidence. She attended Columbia and Northwestern before climbing the ranks as a reporter in Washington—a situation that presented an entirely new set of obstacles, from finding an apartment without rats to finding camaraderie in the workplace. “There’s something terribly frightening about being the only black person at a political newspaper when there’s a black guy running for president,” she writes. “Or should I say freeing?” Much of the book chronicles Andrews’s dating misadventures. Nearing 30, and with a hilariously grandbaby-crazed mother, the author’s reaction to a Washington Post headline titled “Marriage Is for White People” is understandably incredulous. Andrews, however, finds comfort in her artistic success, and has already sold the movie rights to her book.
An irreverent, savvy and sharp memoir.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-177882-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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