In this gutsy but simple-minded memoir, the 49-year-old host and executive producer of El Show de Cristina, copublisher of the magazine Cristina la Revista, and host of the daily radio program Cristina Opina offers her advice on marriage, child-rearing, racial and sexual discrimination, menopause, and the challenge of growing old. Saralegui's colloquial prose also recounts the legends of her proud Basque heritage and her immigrant forebears' affluent lifestyle in the Caribbean. The granddaughter of a millionaire Cuban publishing magnate, she was born in a wealthy suburb of Havana but emigrated to Miami with her family at the age of 12, shortly after Castro's revolution. She gives thumbnail sketches of Cuban character and culture in transition as she and her fellow expatriates made their new home in a tightly knit, middle- class barrio where many immigrants grew up, lived, and died without ever speaking (or needing to speak) a word of English. Saralegui later enrolled at the University of Miami to study communications and creative writing. There she learned the dubious craft of writing ``for the dumb schoolgirl,'' a technique she has all too clearly mastered. Once finished with school, she landed a gig writing mostly fluff pieces for Cosmopolitan en Espa§ola hugely successful Hearst spin-off of which she eventually became editorial director. In that leading role, she seemingly chose to clone her mentor, Helen Gurley Brown, and live the quintessential ``Cosmo Girl's'' unexamined life. Saralegui's comments on her career move to television and radio are as brisk and shallow as all the others. Her life reads like a series of pranks or a continuation of her show's shenanigans, peopled with lackluster acolytes and charlatansvampires and alien abductees alike. A half-witted tell-all in the talk-show mode. (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 19, 1998
ISBN: 0-446-52008-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
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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