A book that hopefully marks the beginning of a fruitful writing career.
A quirky book of personal essays by a successful Hollywood professional.
Many recognize Lahti as the acclaimed actress who has received Oscar, Emmy, and Golden Globe awards for her outstanding performances in countless moving female roles. In her first book, the author launches into the literary world with the same dynamism that has enlivened her acting roles. “Many of these stories are told through the lens of my ever-evolving feminism,” she writes, “the lens through which I see just about everything….I’ve been a clumsy feminist, finding solid footing only to be knocked down again. And I keep finding new veils to be lifted.” With brazen honesty, Lahti recounts the many surprising, heartbreaking, and identity-building events that have punctuated her life. From her earliest childhood memories to her 1960s rebel heart to the launch of her career to more intimate admissions about her acting and mothering techniques, the author crafts an enjoyable book that only requires from readers a willingness to believe, participate, laugh, and grow along with her. Though she identifies herself as a clumsy feminist multiple times, there’s nothing clumsy about her feminism. She is adaptable to the changing sociopolitical climates and never shies away from being challenged by the younger women close to her. “These millennials have taught me that their ‘pro-sex feminism’ is the undeniable next step in empowerment,” she writes. “If men choose to regard them as ‘objects,’ tough shit, that is their problem.” Given the level of Lahti’s success, it is refreshing to read a book of essays that oozes modesty, humor, and complete levelheadedness. The author’s compelling and thought-provoking stories effectively reflect her wisdom as well as her desire to share that wisdom and to keep learning throughout her life. As she writes, “I see this collection as the highs and lows of a feminist who is very much still a work in progress.”
A book that hopefully marks the beginning of a fruitful writing career.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-266367-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harper Wave
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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