A smart, pocket-sized delight that artfully engages the funny bone.
A New York City–based author, mother of three and cancer survivor delivers an outspoken mix of sass and sensibility.
Magazine feature writer and novelist Kargman (The Ex-Mrs. Hedgefund, 2009, etc.) truly believes that laughter is the best medicine and, at 36, is happy to share her self-deprecating brand of wisdom. She explains why baked goods, texting and the smell of gasoline are so personally enticing, as opposed to the repulsive qualities of vans, mimes (“I’m so talkative that the mute thing alone wigs me out”), Don Henley and the wacky au pairs entrusted to babysit during her childhood. Life has been adventuresome so far, Kargman admits, from her days as an outcast at a Connecticut boarding school to the irate, micromanaging boss at a pop-culture magazine who aimed a tape dispenser at her head. But her self-doubts pale in comparison to the confusion and humility experienced after being diagnosed with skin cancer at 35. There’s also tenderness in the unexpected blind date (arranged by her grandmother Ruth) with a “beyond-adorable, scruffy nugget” named Harry who would become her husband and the father of her children. Some laughs pop with snappy sarcasm while others veer into racy, stand-up comedienne material like sections on Jewish Passover Seders and a midlife crisis–inspired tattoo and handgun license. These over-the-top moments are leavened with more focused playfulness, as when the author writes of her solidarity with gay men, the agony of natural childbirth (“having a bowling ball cruise through a straw”), her disenchantment with office work or, after the birth of her first daughter, the co-mingling sessions with “a breed of hypercompetitive type-A mothers” known as “Momzillas.” Cute, rudimentary line drawings pepper a narrative that will incite nods of agreement as Kargman writes that “the ones who live the best obviously aren’t the ones with the most money or most successful careers; they’re the ones who laugh the most.”
A smart, pocket-sized delight that artfully engages the funny bone.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-200719-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
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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