by Catherine Millet & translated by Helen Stevenson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2010
Remarkably honest. There is something both sad and deeply satisfying about watching this legendary mistress of emotional...
The famously sexually open memoirist grapples with jealousy.
In her bestselling memoir (The Sexual Life of Catherine M, 2002), Paris art critic Millet shocked the world with her unapologetically candid descriptions of an extravagant sex life with no boundaries and, seemingly, no consequences. After losing her virginity at 18, she immediately engaged in a weeklong bacchanalia of group sex. As an adult, she moved between long-term partners, but was consistently involved in sexual relationships with other people. She eventually ended up in a committed but open marriage to a fellow critic named Jacques. Soon after, however, Millet found in Jacques’ study a series of letters and photographs indicating that he was having an emotional, as well as physical, affair with another woman. Just as with her sexual life, Millet discusses her jealousy of this woman in a detached, intellectual tone, laying it out nakedly with no sense of embarrassment—though with some personal shock at the circumstances, as if her openness toward sexual pleasure ought to have left her immune to jealousy. To cope, the author traveled through Europe, obsessing about the details of the affair, calling Jacques in various states of emotional distress and at times retreating totally within herself. There are particular moments of poignant pain—when she became physically sick, for example, and had no recollection of it until Jacques pointed it out—but for most of the book her grief is stunningly relatable, even ordinary. In the end, she clawed her way back to trusting Jacques, though the experience left a distinct mark on her spirit.
Remarkably honest. There is something both sad and deeply satisfying about watching this legendary mistress of emotional bravado crumble.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1915-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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by Catherine Millet & translated by Adriana Hunter
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 Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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SEEN & HEARD
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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