A drawn-out, sometimes-amusing examination of the author's search for a loving relationship with a man, any man.
One woman's confessions about not having a love life.
Beginning with her first boy infatuation at age 7 and advancing to the ripe age of 25, Heaney takes readers on an exhaustive, descriptive jaunt through her multiple boy crushes and attempts to obtain a boyfriend. Readers who get through the first 20 pages without thinking “who cares” may enjoy the author’s self-deprecating humor, which borders on unfunny as she laments and bemoans her fate. She claims, however, that "[m]ost of the time it does not upset me to think about my sad, old, decrepit spinster body…not having a boyfriend at any given moment bothers me very little. Not having ever had one bothers me only slightly more." Tongue in cheek, Heaney reminisces about boys from kindergarten and beyond—their hair, the way they talked, how she felt around them, what she wrote in her diary back then; she quotes to emphasize her points. This sets the tone as she proceeds to delve deeply into her affections, near loves and possible first dates in high school, college and graduate school. She tried drinking, being flirty, being distant and aloof, and even succumbed to the oftentimes humiliating moments of setting up an online dating profile only to discover that some men send the exact same message to every single woman. Throughout multiple near hits, an occasional kiss or two, and numerous boy friends but no boyfriends, the author has maintained her circle of girlfriends to gossip with, run to for advice and downright hate when any of them lands the guy they both secretly desired. Heaney's misadventures are more a testament to the power of friendship among women than anything comical regarding her struggle to find real love.
A drawn-out, sometimes-amusing examination of the author's search for a loving relationship with a man, any man.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4555-4467-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
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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