Occasionally entertaining yet featherweight capers of an overweight woman trying to be cheery and carefree through her...
How one woman tackled some of the things on her mid-40s bucket list.
For fans of Lancaster’s (Twisted Sisters, 2014, etc.) particular brand of humor, she’s back in full swing with another memoir full of embarrassing moments, comments about her size and weight, and general midlife-crisis events triggered by realizing she has turned 46 and should create a list of things to accomplish before she dies. “As enamored as I am with the idea of listing and then finally scratching some long-standing itches, a part of this idea feels off,” she writes. “Essentially, I’m figuring out what I’d like to accomplish before I ‘kick the bucket,’ which means I’m definitely going to die. Not a fan.” From this point of view, Lancaster prepares her list, starting with a new playlist of music since she had been listening to the same bands for 30 years. The author meanders through a variety of escapades: learning to ride an adult tricycle, studying Italian, traveling to Italy, finding a new hobby, confronting her weight issues and compulsive eating habits, etc. She discusses her dogs, her husband, her friends, her dysfunctional body parts, a possible chance to meet and talk face to face with Martha Stewart, the challenge of doing juice cleanses—basically, just about anything that comes to mind she approaches with the same attitude: somewhat funny, quick, and lighthearted, reminiscent of sitcom humor but lacking any real substance or grit. Readers may laugh in the moment, but the punch line doesn’t carry over in a retelling. For pure entertainment of the lightest fluff, Lancaster is sure to please her many devoted readers; for those looking for words of wisdom on how a woman can navigate the 40-to-50 decade with dignity, while still having fun, they should search elsewhere for sustenance.
Occasionally entertaining yet featherweight capers of an overweight woman trying to be cheery and carefree through her middle-age years.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-451-47107-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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