Sure to be a hit with romantically challenged readers, though neither as clever nor comical as, the fictional Bridget saga...
New York Post columnist Harrison works over her love life in a predictable memoir.
Moving from London to New York to take a newspaper job, the British singleton had trouble getting the hang of hardcore reporting. Asking people to spill their guts about, say, the recent murder of their uncle felt uncouth and invasive. Luckily, Harrison fell into writing a column about her desperate attempts to meet a man in Manhattan, where women between 20 and 49 outnumber their male contemporaries by about half a million. She went on blind dates and speed dates. She wrestled with the question of how often to call a guy she liked, whether or not to snog in the first five minutes of a date and whether Banana Republic’s stretchy couture was “subtle-yet-sexy” or “way too tacky for a first date.” Meanwhile, she was carrying a torch for her boss, Jack. Lo and behold, it turned out he was pining for her too, and the lovebirds finally got together. A serious relationship has just as much drama as a bunch of bad blind dates, Harrison demonstrates; after all, she was ensnared in an office romance, and her job was to chronicle her romantic adventures in the newspaper edited by her new honey. Things with Jack eventually fizzled, of course. Next came a wealthy banker, but he thought she took him for granted and ultimately gave her the boot. Harrison throws in the requisite, if uninspired, chapter on 9/11, and the familiar props of chick-lit are here in spades: endless hand-wringing about being too old to snag a guy or conceive a child, references to Manolo Blahniks and Sarah Jessica Parker, plus enough alcohol to float a small yacht.
Sure to be a hit with romantically challenged readers, though neither as clever nor comical as, the fictional Bridget saga that doubtless inspired it.Pub Date: June 30, 2006
ISBN: 0-7382-1044-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
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
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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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