by Joanne Drayton ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2014
Occasionally uneven but a pleasure for Perry’s loyal fans and a book that is likely to win her some new ones as well.
Literary biographer Drayton (Design/Unitec Institute of Technology; Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime, 2008, etc.) turns her attention to novelist Anne Perry (b. 1938) and the past she couldn’t keep hidden.
The author begins at a pivotal moment in Perry’s life: the phone call from a journalist to her agent offering the theory—about to be printed—that Perry was actually Juliet Hulme, perpetrator of a famous New Zealand murder. When that theory turned out to be fact, the lives of Perry and all those connected to her were turned upside down. Perry, her agents and her publicist have always argued that the murder is in the past, and Perry, who committed the crime as a teenager, and her family should be allowed to leave it there. While it is difficult not to feel for Perry, it is equally difficult to ignore the fact that the argument holds sway over this biography as well. Drayton creates a conundrum in which she has made Perry’s unveiling as Hulme the center of the book but also believes it deserves less attention than it’s been given. However, the author ably plumbs the Hulme story for how it has shaped Perry’s crime fiction and provides other insights into Perry’s writing style and process. The author includes detailed background on Perry’s unpublished attempts, as well as the origins and development of many of her best-selling books. Though they interrupt the narrative flow, descriptions of each of Perry’s novels will trigger interest for those unfamiliar with her work. Drayton tells a beguiling story of an author’s climb to the best-seller lists and how a secret she would rather keep hidden was publicly made known.
Occasionally uneven but a pleasure for Perry’s loyal fans and a book that is likely to win her some new ones as well.Pub Date: July 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62872-324-3
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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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