Somewhere in the midst of all the post-slacker knocking about, Williams comes up with a smart, breezy chronicle about a...
Ruminations on life, love, and lesbian subcultures.
In her first book-length nonfiction (her work also appears in Out magazine and online at LesbiaNation.com), novelist Williams (Girl Walking Backwards, 1998) starts with her drive to a nightclub holding a Trash Disco Night. The goings-on are appropriately depraved and less than logical, peripherally involving Williams’s non-obsessive non-relationship with a gorgeous submissive named Anikka. The text moves on to other topics, but in a sense never quite leaves the nightclub. Like most members of her early-30s generation, the writer is impressively grounded in pop and underground culture; the highlight here is her visit to Ladyfest, a riotgrrl music/political awareness festival in Olympia, Washington. Wandering among the testy mix of young hippie women and overly fashion-conscious punk chicks, Williams gets antsy at just how hard it is to get laid in this achingly PC landscape: “The phrase ‘identity politics’ makes me want to become a heroin addict. I have dents in my wall from hurling books by bell hooks.” There’s a lot more in that vein: slashing attacks on the stifling attitudes of her lesbian nation that are yet leavened with a desperate, passionate love. (Perhaps you can only truly critique what you adore.) The author’s intelligent, self-deprecating manner allows her to pull off pretty much anything, from reflecting on her relationship with a teenaged girl—oh-so-improper, she knows—to rhapsodizing about the wrestling parties she hosts for her friends involving a real wrestling mat and lots of vegetable oil.
Somewhere in the midst of all the post-slacker knocking about, Williams comes up with a smart, breezy chronicle about a smart, breezy woman who’s game for just about anything and has something sharp to say all the time.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-55583-785-9
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Alyson
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
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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