by Amy Pascale ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2014
An informative and readable book that often resembles a long PR piece.
Obsessively detailed treatment of the director of The Avengers and creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly and other TV series.
Debut nonfiction author Pascale, a director at MTV, delivers a biography of Whedon that caters to the massive worldwide community of sci-fi obsessives who won’t settle for anything less than exhaustive details on the object of their obsession. The author takes readers through the auteur's privileged upbringing—his father penned lyrics for Broadway shows and also wrote for The Electric Company and Golden Girls—and formative educational years spent first in an English boarding school and then studying film at prestigious Wesleyan University, where he cut his teeth as both a teacher and a writer/director. After a stint as a video clerk, Whedon’s break as a writer came through his father’s industry connections; eventually, he landed a job as a writer on Roseanne in the early 1990s; not long after, he sold the screenplay for the original movie version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But Whedon would bounce around from show to show as a behind-the-scenes writer and script doctor until his proverbial big break came in the mid-1990s when his Buffy character was refined and recast as a weekly TV series on the WB network. That series lasted almost seven years and accumulated an intense, devoted following. Pascale totally immerses the reader in the “Whedonverse,” a sort of neo-feminist supernatural world grounded in everyday human dilemmas. The author pens worshipful prose throughout, extolling Whedon’s never-ending quest for complete control over his work, and she occasionally goes overboard: For example, does even the most obsessive fan really care what brand of pen and notepad Whedon prefers? By the end of the book, Pascale has adequately familiarized us with the creative commercial artist side of Whedon; however, the actual human being behind all the demons and vampires is never satisfactorily fleshed out.
An informative and readable book that often resembles a long PR piece.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61374-104-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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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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