Though her approach might be a "shock to the system" for some, it will be crass and tedious to many.
The career arc of a TV personality who has "made a career and an art form out of swearing."
First-time author Keagan—the host and producer of VH1's Big Morning Buzz Live and the co-creator and lead anchor of YouTube's No Good TV—has thrived with her alternative to the tame, publicist-approved celebrity interview; instead, she encourages her invitees to be spontaneous and unfiltered, including the freedom to curse. When she tells her guests that "anything goes," they drop their guards and admit they feel liberated. While they are unrestricted, the challenge for her was to walk “a fine line between being fun & friendly, flirty & filthy, and being respectable…while I was being R-rated, the goal for me and my writers was to do it with intelligence and precision. More Howard Stern than Stuttering John.” Through her thousands of interviews, Keagan has learned that celebrities have "a penchant for profanity,” and she encourages readers to embrace vulgarities and reject prudish, proper language. Under the pretense of being authentic, the author describes Hollywood players and the pecking order with hundreds of inane synonyms for sex acts and body parts. This extends to dozens of sophomoric expressions for her own breasts. Keagan also includes several interview transcripts (Sandra Bullock, Nelly, Matt Damon, Quentin Tarantino, and others); unfortunately, they aren't especially humorous on the page and will make readers wonder if they were funnier on-screen. Despite the author’s endless enthusiasm and claims that these conversations were transgressive, they just don’t translate to print. Readers who agree with Keagan's premise that "people tend to get too hung up on words instead of the intent behind them”—or enjoy reading dozens of instances of celebrities swearing—will find plenty to entertain, but the author’s lack of sophistication and pointed social commentary make this 400-plus-page book a chore.
Though her approach might be a "shock to the system" for some, it will be crass and tedious to many.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-02620-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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
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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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