by Chrisann Brennan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 29, 2013
For those who require the full Jobs collection.
Free-wheeling memoir of the author’s relationship with the young Steve Jobs, which led to the birth of their daughter, Lisa.
When artist Brennan writes that “[t]he histories of women involved with so-called great men occupy a shabby territory in the public’s mind,” it is a poor strategy to deflect potential criticism of motives and conduct, for it dodges personal responsibility, something she imparts to Jobs, who swarmed with “misanthropic confusion.” Their on-again, off-again relationship was never smooth, and the author could relate to Jobs’ adoptive mother’s comment: “Steve was so difficult a child that by the time he was two I felt we had made a mistake. I wanted to return him.” Regardless, the author “knew he was a genius when I first saw him because his eyes shone with brilliant, complicated cartwheels of light,” that he “had a big conversation going on inside,” and when he spoke, “[h]e would often say things that seemed to come from the high winds of a vast plain.” In Jobs, she found a seeker who came with a price—“Highs and lows are what it takes to break the mold of previous consciousness and allow world-shattering ideas to be birthed”—but Jobs was psychologically damaged goods, needy of all the attention, and “[h]e’d wipe people out in the process” of getting it. Brennan writes of their taking LSD, Jobs’ Zen teacher and his friendships, and a sweet vignette of days on a communal farm, yet she provides nothing groundbreaking. Jobs was cheap and caustic and tried to drive a stake between mother and daughter—though seemingly worthy criticism bleeds into odd psychological speculation: “I will be clear. Steve was not a sexual predator of children. There was something else going on…my sense is that part of Steve’s fractured emotional development resulted in his ludicrously fetishizing sexuality and romance.”
For those who require the full Jobs collection.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-03876-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
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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 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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