Expanding on his 2010 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, written under the name “Ed Dante,” Tomar offers a book-length account of his decade writing research papers for college students on any topic and at any length.
For the most part, the author blames the system for his misdeeds. His overpriced degree from Rutgers never got him further than “fluid bottler” at a shady cleaning company. “As it turned out,” he writes, “helping students cheat on papers was the only available job for which my college had prepared me.” Besides, he reasons, there would be no need for his service if the current generation of entitled, Facebook-addicted, subliterate brats hadn’t been raised to think they could buy their way through anything. Also, he was good at it, routinely burning through sleepless, frantic weeks spewing out lightning-speed papers, sometimes as many as seven per day. His work became impressively ambitious. Sure Samuel Johnson could write Rasselas in a week, but could he have churned out a 160-page paper with 50 sources on “international financial reporting standards” in a mere five days? Although his book suffers from some obvious padding, as he wanders in and out of stories involving his love life, poker buddies and psychotic road trips, Tomar is a funny guy who writes with slangy, over-the top verve, veering between self-justification and self-hatred. He also provides some genuine inside dirt on the business practices of sleazy for-profit colleges, who provide some of his steadiest clients. A cynical, guilt-obsessed, intermittently page-turning account of a first-class bullshit artist and his never-ending search for redemption.
Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60819-723-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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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