Intermittently chuckle-worthy tale that never lives up to its once-in-a-lifetime title.
Semi-virginal Israeli army-intelligence vet picks up her backpack and heads east, drawn by the prospect of travel and potential deflowering.
The first time Bahr tried to have sex, it was with a Moroccan paratrooper she met while on guard duty at her Israeli army base. Even though he was strangely gorgeous (the other soldiers on base being intelligence types: “very brilliant and very very ugly”) and quite into the idea, it was a (partially completed) disaster. So, two years later, 20-year-old Bahr—a transplanted Bronx girl fresh out of the military and years away from TV semi-stardom, on Curb Your Enthusiasm—gets ready for an Asian backpacking jaunt, fully determined to get away from her clingy mom, the military and her virginity. Things start off poorly for the author, whose travel buddy abandons her in Thailand, leaving her to aggressively market herself to other backpacking groups in order to not travel alone. A stint in the jungle with a pair of drugged-up Brits goes poorly (the cute one is more interested in lying to Thai hookers about wanting to marry them to get free sex), while adventures in Vietnam with an overly friendly girl also named Iris go little better. Things reach a nadir when Bahr ends up in the Himalayas flirting simultaneously with a couple of best friends and snapping in jealousy at the other women in their ad-hoc party. Bahr has a flair for the self-deprecating wisecrack, a trick that keeps this quick memoir moving. But often she’s so busy indulging in competition with backpacker girls, and ignoring men who are interested in her while chasing after those who aren’t, that the actual traveling gets short shrift. If romantic melodrama was all she wanted, she could have stayed in Israel.
Intermittently chuckle-worthy tale that never lives up to its once-in-a-lifetime title.Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 1-59691-234-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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