Though the oddly unfulfilled premise remains a bungle, Wentworth charms her way to safety with her endearing reflections.
Facing her 50th birthday, Wentworth (Ali in Wonderland, 2012, etc.) embarks on an inspirational quest to self-betterment as she reflects on teachable moments from her life.
Positive reinforcement can be a hard thing to come by, especially, as the actress and comedian realized, when on the verge of middle age. At 49, Wentworth was feeling blue and overcome by lassitude. Needing a change, she turned to an unexpected source of wisdom: Twitter. By following the aphoristic teachings of 140-word inspirational tweets, the author began a project to cast off her discontent and remake a “dynamic, sleeker, and turbocharged” self. However, Wentworth’s plan to use Twitter as a guide to spiritual enlightenment disappears as quickly as it is introduced. Nowhere in her anti–self-help musings about marriage, wellness, and parenting does she return to this premise. The only connection to her Twitter concept is her insertion of oddly hashtagged phrases and Twitter handles in lieu of certain surnames. She haphazardly includes inspirational wisdom gleaned from her anecdotes about a former nemesis–turned-friend, the comedy of errors that was her invitation to give a commencement speech, and a cameraman that sullied her powder room. Thankfully, Wentworth is funny. She gracefully and elegantly bares embarrassing stories from her past and hilariously conveys the challenges of her marriage to ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos and of raising their two children—e.g., when her daughter desperately wanted a guinea pig for her birthday, which, accordingly to Wentworth, is nothing more than a glorified rodent. With wit, the author may inspire others to simply enjoy the moment and not let themselves get in the way.
Though the oddly unfulfilled premise remains a bungle, Wentworth charms her way to safety with her endearing reflections.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-223849-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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