Prolific chick-lit novelist and funny girl Frankel (Thin Is the New Happy: A Memoir, 2008, etc.) dishes about what there is to love about hatred.
In her latest, the author explores the more unseemly side of her nature. The resulting string of essays on negativity and its pursuits includes a number of hilarious moments alongside helpful, hard-won insights into parenting and the nature of complaining. When presented with the grim news that she and most of her family are genetically predisposed to a variety of abdominal cancers, Frankel opted to look within to see whether a change of attitude might improve her state: “My doctor told me the hate in me just had to come out. I followed his orders, fessing up to jealousy, phoniness, coldness, bitterness, insecurity, envy, distrust, impatience, revulsion, pettiness, bitchiness. Name the hate, I let it out. The big question: Was I happier for it?” Answer: not entirely. “I’d say that I was generally more ‘er’ about all of my emotions,” writes Frankel, “which (bonus) made me deeper.” Though longing for the critical acclaim afforded select other members of the chick literati, the author confesses an unwillingness to dispense with her self-professed shallowness: “If misery were required for depth, I’d rather be a lesser artist. In fact, I was a lesser artist.” Frankel admits having been born into a family of “kvetchperts,” and she looks to her youth, when she was rejected by the “in” crowd and criticized by her mother because of her weight. Though this loosely chronological account exhibits the vague arc of plot development and emotional growth, the memoir lacks the narrative cohesion and relevance needed to give it the je ne sais quoi of a bestseller. With humor, Frankel shrewdly probes her darkly shallow places.
Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-60978-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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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