by Anne Roiphe ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 15, 2011
A sharp, graphic potrayal of bohemian times that thoughtfully reveals the young woman the author once was.
A crafty, veteran novelist and memoirist (Epilogue, 2008, etc.) recalls her coming-of-age as a sexy smarty-pants.
Roiphe effectively evokes the atmosphere in which a clever, pretty Jewish girl from Park Avenue might aspire to have it all, particularly if she was ready to provide whatever a needy poet, painter or playwright yearned for at the moment. Art, literature, rebellion and angst—that was life. Fresh from the sisterhood of Smith College, the author landed directly in the hot intellectual dormitory that was midcentury New York City. It was a world in which Arthur Kopit and Jack Gelber heatedly discussed Samuel Beckett and Jean Genét, where Terry Southern debated, where George Plimpton held court. Mailer and Styron were there, too. (The author notes that some names are changed in the interest of privacy). The nubile author’s postgraduate education in the arts featured encounters, frequently in bed, with such lubricious artistic teachers. They were famous and unknown, wealthy and poor, struggling aspirants and swindling liars, gay, straight, bisexual, soaked in alcohol and mostly oversexed. Roiphe discusses the awkward loss of her virginity and subsequent marriage to a feckless, failed poet and playwright. She eventually had a child and remarried. In the mob of self-centered tricksters, all she wanted was to be a writer, and she succeeded quite pleasingly. The foreword is provided by journalist daughter Katie, who writes that “this book is the record of an idea as it moves through a life: the idea is the supreme and consuming importance of art.”
A sharp, graphic potrayal of bohemian times that thoughtfully reveals the young woman the author once was.Pub Date: March 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-385-53164-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
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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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