by Sara Benincasa ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2012
Fabulously quirky and outrageous.
A blisteringly funny yet affecting debut memoir about a young woman’s struggle to overcome panic disorder and agoraphobia.
Podcast host and award-winning comedian Benincasa recounts her adolescent devolution into a “full-on, obsessive, cowering, trembling agoraphobe.” She suffered her first panic attacks when she was 11 and was taking antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs to control her condition by the time she was 16. Her phobias continued to intensify to the point where even short trips to the hair salon became difficult for her. Benincasa, however, ignored the signs that her “weird problems” were getting worse until she got to college. During her junior year, she broke down completely. In the terrible omniscience born from madness, she woke up one day “knowing” that to leave her apartment meant certain disaster. The comedian then began a slow and painful surrender to the phobias that had dogged her from childhood. Her bed became her refuge, cereal bowls her toilets. Therapy, homemade smoothies, “Zentastic, organic, free-range, fair trade, sustainable, sage-scented self-help books” and the timely intervention of friends and family pulled Benincasa back from the edge of her agoraphobic abyss. But she continued to wrestle with her demons through college, teaching jobs and graduate school until she discovered, by accident, the healing power of stand-up comedy. “I subscribe to the notion,” she writes, “that if you can laugh at the shittiest moments in your life, you can transcend them.”
Fabulously quirky and outrageous.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-202441-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
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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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