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HOUSE OF CARDS

LOVE, FAITH, AND OTHER SOCIAL EXPRESSIONS: A MEMOIR

While Dickerson’s alternately amusing and painful anecdotes speak clearly to all, a lack of perspective on his time at...

This American Life contributor Dickerson recounts his time working for Hallmark in an amusing but disjointed debut memoir.

In his late 20s, the author, a crossword-puzzle writer and recovering evangelical Christian, landed what he hoped would be his dream job with the famous proprietor of sentiment. During his tenure with the company, Dickerson interacted with a surprisingly wide range of personalities and was passed back and forth between several different departments. Amid the amusing anecdotes of jokes fallen flat, petty passive-aggressive encounters and his bizarre methods of dealing with writer’s block, the author interlaces tales of other experiences, both life-altering and pedestrian (hiring a prostitute to touch her breasts, a shopping spree at The Gap). The stories are often provocative, fun to read and horribly familiar to those who have worked for large corporations, but Dickerson’s intent—both for the reader and himself—is unclear. In addition, he often piques the reader’s interest with leading phrases and language, and then fails to deliver the expected punch or glosses over profound revelations before moving on to a different topic. For example, after announcing that a potentially cancerous lump turned out to be merely an ingrown hair, Dickerson promptly segues into a prolonged story of further attempts to regain the approval of his boss through jokes that ultimately misfire horribly. His tendency to abruptly switch gears among topics like work, sex and religion with no framework to pull them together results in a haphazard stumble through a period in the author’s life.

While Dickerson’s alternately amusing and painful anecdotes speak clearly to all, a lack of perspective on his time at Hallmark may leave readers wandering as aimlessly as the author so often did at the greeting-card giant.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009

ISBN: 978-1-59448-881-8

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

NOTES ON THE FIRST 150 YEARS IN AMERICA

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

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  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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