A beautiful book that provides genuine encouragement and inspiration.
Vivid portrait photography and accompanying essays declare that all work is women’s work.
Every picture tells a story, and these photos alone, many of them full page or two-page spreads, show women fighting fires, dealing with prisoners, flying planes, taming horses, mining gold, farming oysters, writing, teaching, coaching basketball, and baking—among dozens of other professions. Take the two sisters responsible for Georgetown Cupcake in Washington, D.C., who “had dreamed about opening a bakery since we were young girls,” before getting sidetracked into “careers in fashion and venture capital.” And now? They “bake over twenty-five thousand cupcakes a day and have over three hundred employees across the country.” In addition to bakers, the book includes a butcher, a blacksmith, a firearms and archery instructor, a beekeeper and urban gardener, and a vice president of Google. Many of them are immigrants or minorities; some of them find themselves in fields where there is no family background or female mentorship. They have taken as many different career paths as there are careers, yet much of the advice they offer is straightforward and consistent: Do what you love. Be persistent. Don’t worry about what others think or say. The younger women often recognize that earlier generations of women had it tougher, and they are determined to level the playing field even more for generations to come. The personal testimonies are inspirational throughout, and the photos embody the same spirit. Some are stunning in their composition and color contrast, from the many that are shot in the natural world—the author/photographer biography notes that in addition to his prizewinning commercial work, he is “a photographer specializing in environmental portraiture”—to the ones at the slaughterhouse, the funeral home, and the prison. Says a prison guard, “I will always be an advocate for women pursuing any career interest they have. You’ve got to remember that there are others, somewhere, doing what you want to do.”
A beautiful book that provides genuine encouragement and inspiration.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-211037-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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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