by Jeannette Walls ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 7, 2000
a naughty mudbath. Snoopy scatoscopy at its juiciest.
A cable TV gossip spills the beans about a lot, if not all, the tricks of her feline trade and, naturally, delivers plenty of old
and new dirt along with it. Clever reporter Walls fuses the story of tawdry practices by the personality industry with some prime gossip. The Hollywood flaks, the tabloid snoops, the retailers of the lubricious detritus of the news, and the researchers of the wanton behavior of famous folk are investigated in this study of an especially lively branch of journalism. Walls's study, perforce, often includes titillating tales of celebs and those who celebrate them. The sexual proclivities of Matt Drudge, Mike Wallace's acne scars, and Tina Brown's healthy bosom are all looked into in a text that sort of frowns on the excesses of commercial voyeurism. It's an old- fashioned sideshow, high-spirited, mean-spirited, and plenty of guilty fun. Harking back to Walter Winchell, Hedda Hopper, and Louella Parsons, Walls’s report on the tattle-tale industry includes the scoop on People, The Enquirer, Confidential, 60 Minutes, and the inevitable infection of the mainstream press. Players include all the old favorites: Liz Taylor, Tom Cruise, Michael Jackson, the Donald, O.J., and, of course, the late Princess Di, the late Marilyn, and the late (discounting hearsay) Elvis, among others. Roy Cohn appears throughout, as do various Kennedys. Only Fatty Arbuckle seems to be neglected. Among the less surprising revelations: Checkbook journalism is widely practiced, even by the most respected newsfolk; people known for being famous use the press for their own purposes; celebrities hire private eyes to nail enemies; wayward stars aren't capable of remorse (only anger). Shocking Revelations! Surprising Buzz About Media Buzzards! Here is a Janus-faced muckraker, one side telling how ink is spilled on keyhole revelations, the other offering some fun in
a naughty mudbath. Snoopy scatoscopy at its juiciest.Pub Date: March 7, 2000
ISBN: 0-380-97821-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2000
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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 Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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