A very funny but sometimes self-indulgent account of life chasing art and avoiding responsibility.
Christopher (Emily’s Little Pilot of Loquacious Weather, 2013, etc.) has figured out the secret to consistently landing a job on the quick: brazenly, confidently lie about your credentials. Here’s his comedic, meandering quest to find quick employment and avoid a long-lasting career.
In the midst of an ailing job market, this is an especially timely book. Covering two decades and 81 jobs, this series of first-person essays charts an eclectic and in some ways strangely impressive tour of jobs. Christopher visits both the highs and lows of employment, working as a writer, a mortuary driver, a plumber’s assistant and a copy editor of gay porn. At that last gig, once outed as a heterosexual, he was the victim of sexual harassment perpetrated by a female superior. The tone is always breezy and ironic, though the constant posture of cleverness can sometimes grate as it becomes a kind of “too cool for school” aversion to bourgeois careerism. Thankfully, the book can be lively and genuinely hilarious as well as bracingly self-critical. Somewhat frustratingly, though, despite a few mentions of personal autonomy and being “the protagonist in your own living novel,” it’s not exactly clear why the author insists on such an itinerant lifestyle. “I’ve never subscribed to that old-fashioned American Dream of having just one career for 35 years, followed by a cane-bound trance of heart medications, hip problems and Law & Order,” he says. “Nothing scares me more, to be honest, even as I near dangerously close to middle age myself. Instead, I prefer to taste life. I prefer to taste many lives, actually.” Responding to a command from his father to essentially get a job, not to mention a life, he reflects: “But then from out of nowhere springs a statement so profound and so uncommonly logical as: I need to live life in order to write about life. So simple yet so philosophical—existential, even.” What redeems much of the shallowness here is that Christopher is much more than what he claims to be, “a professional pretender for a decent paycheck and health insurance.” After all, while tasting many lives, he’s written four books.
A very funny but sometimes self-indulgent account of life chasing art and avoiding responsibility.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0990573203
Page Count: 294
Publisher: BH Publications Pte Ltd.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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