Practical but dispiriting social spadework.
Washington Flyer contributing editor and “clueless romantic” Machacek spends a year looking for true love.
After a fizzled long-distance relationship followed by miserable blind dates, the frustrated 33-year-old became proactive, beginning a 12-month “experiment” using a variety of matchmaking outlets to find her Mr. Right. The opening statistics are discouraging—a 2005 survey of Internet users: “55% of singles reported no active interest in seeking a romantic partner”—yet Machacek plodded on, posting profiles on sites like Match.com, eHarmony, IJL (“It’s Just Lunch”) and The Onion Personals. The expectations were lofty, but the in-person dates disappointed in both looks and personality as much as the rapid-fire exchanges at speed dating and the four weeks of blind dating, which failed to turn up anyone with which the author shared romantic chemistry. Machacek appealed to family, friends and co-workers for support, especially sage gay pal Kenneth, who’s “equal parts crotchety old man and charming queen.” With one service charging more than $1,000, the author learned the costly side of romance alongside the quagmires of dating outside her area code and coming clean to potential love interests about her experiment. Whether these men failed to entice her due to “stylistic blunders,” lack of physical attraction or spark, the author repeatedly found herself “caught in a melee of not-quite-rights.” Some of the calamity is humorous, and there’s fun to be had in the chase itself, but her “superficial judgments” on the parade of men who abruptly came and went eventually doomed her serial dating project. To her credit, the author acquiesces to hard-won personal revelations about her shallowness and sabotaging tendencies to prejudge others. Machacek’s most rational conclusion, however, concerns her refusal to settle for less—to “not choose anyone in order to keep myself open to someone who is right for me.”
Practical but dispiriting social spadework.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59448-496-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
