by Barbara Kline ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 5, 2005
For what it is, very funny, very insightful, and very well done. But it would be nice if Kline were a bit less myopic.
A lighthearted intervention into America’s discussion about child-care.
Kline is the founder of White House Nannies Inc., which provides cabinet secretaries and the press corps with their child-care. She tells war stories from her years matching up kiddie caretakers with the nation’s powerbrokers. At the center of it all is high-profile newscaster Janette Huntington (presumably a composite). She called Kline days before the birth of her son because the nanny she’d engaged had just quit, opting for a post that came with bigger closets in the nanny suite. (Good nannies can find themselves outfitted with a Porsche, monthly spa days and a trip to the Caribbean, all in the interest of keeping that most crucial member of the household happy.) Kline was able to find the perfect match—hard-working, devoted Emma—and gives over much of the text to describing the first few years of baby Huntington’s life, during which he spent far more waking hours with the nanny than with mom and pop. Such seeming success stories alternate with outrageous vignettes about nutty parents and demanding nannies who all enter therapy to deal with the stress of fast-paced living. The parents portrayed here are desperate to do their best for the kids, but their best translates into excellent child-care, not time with their children. “Family togetherness is rarer than a Japanese cherry tree in bloom in Washington. In January,” Klein avers. That’s as close to a critique as she gets—of course, too robust a critique would undermine her business. But the failure to engage larger questions is a major flaw here. Does this remote-control parenting have any detrimental affects on kids? What about all those parents who work not because they want fulfillment, but because they want to keep food on the table, who can’t afford the $750 per week for White House Nannies Inc.?
For what it is, very funny, very insightful, and very well done. But it would be nice if Kline were a bit less myopic.Pub Date: May 5, 2005
ISBN: 1-58542-410-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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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