by Jeff Nichols ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 7, 2009
Life as a loser makes wan humor. Wait for the movie.
Another excessively candid memoir from a stand-up comedian.
As Nichols reached middle age after having failed at just about everything, his feckless life somehow became the focus of an independent film. Despite his well-heeled, WASPy genes, the author is afflicted with a speech impediment, ADD, dyslexia and a mild case of Tourette’s. A slob with poor hygiene, he stutters and is fearful of New Balance shoes. Dysfunction is his shtick. He’s botched virtually every endeavor since boarding school and college, during which he concentrated solely on alcohol, various drugs and misbehavior. After a disastrous bike tour through Europe, Nichols landed on Wall Street, where he lasted for one year. A slew of odd jobs followed, including house painting, a stab at dictionary sales and, mostly, substitute teaching to supplement the college and club bookings. The lonesome loser sank a yacht and burned down his family’s lake house. He spent a lot of time at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, which he attended to meet women and push his stand-up career. These days the author abstains from booze and blow, but he notes that he “put down the drink and instantly picked up sugar, coffee, and cigarettes—all okay and sanctioned within the confines of society.” He’s got a girl and a license as a fishing-boat captain. Comically, Nichols focuses on bodily conditions and emissions. Like many contemporary stand-up comics, the material is simply sullied shock talk masquerading as whimsical banter. Despite avowals that it’s all quite funny, the story of how one 40-year-old juvenile became a better person is really just indecorous solipsism.
Life as a loser makes wan humor. Wait for the movie.Pub Date: July 7, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9916-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
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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 Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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