Frequently sharp and funny, but Cohen veers so often between comedy and despair that the effect is disorienting.
Uneven memoir by a sitcom writer who survived a series of personal tragedies.
Witty but depression-prone Cohen was thrilled to land a gig on the staff of Manhattan-based Spin City, although she eventually likened the job to “a dysfunctional family Thanksgiving…a group of people are crammed around a table, yelling over one another while eating to the point of discomfort.” Then, in quick succession, Cohen was fired from her dream job, her beloved mother died of cancer and her boyfriend dumped her. Grief manifested itself as a disfiguring facial rash so severe that she was sequestered in her apartment for nearly a year, unable to endure humidity and restricted to a bland diet. Suddenly, without explanation, the memoir moves on to show Cohen teaching spinning classes at her local gym and cautiously dating a TV reporter. Too much is left unexplained: Why was she fired, and why didn’t she pursue other television jobs? How was her medical condition resolved, and was it truly psychosomatic? And why, since her boyfriend was such a jerk, was she unable to move on some two years after the breakup? “I liked to consider myself a late bloomer, meaning someone who would eventually, however late, come into bloom,” Cohen writes. “Although when and if I would bloom remained a mystery.” Fortunately, she eventually did flower, tackling bike riding and tennis lessons with equal parts terror and bravado, and beginning a new career as a dating columnist. When, at 39, she finally met “William” (he requested a pseudonym), the two instantly connected and quickly became engaged. Although the relationship dissolved when William’s father died and he returned to California to work through his grief, this time Cohen retained her equilibrium.
Frequently sharp and funny, but Cohen veers so often between comedy and despair that the effect is disorienting.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4013-0002-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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
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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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