by Davon Loeb ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2023
Engagingly delivered, candid reflections on heritage and identity.
Resonant tales of growing up biracial.
Loeb, an assistant features editor at the Rumpus, makes his book debut with an engaging coming-of-age memoir in the form of lyrical essays. The son of a White Jewish father and Black mother, the author was raised by his mother after his parents divorced. With his “sandy beige” skin, he was “the white boy in a family of Black boys and Black girls, of Black men and Black women, and years of being Black in this stoic world made my skin some kind of leprosy.” Loeb was one of only a few Black kids in school, which was especially troubling during Black History Month, when he felt singled out. Although he played with White boys and ate at their families’ tables, he became acutely aware of underlying racism. Loeb dealt with the awkwardness of adolescence by taking cues from the ways Blacks were portrayed in popular culture. “I had no balance between being Black and acting Black,” he writes. “The two were inseparable. I was just a replica of the things I saw on television.” The author vividly recounts visits with members of his extended family, including his Nana, the grandfather who taught him to fight, and the many boisterous cousins with whom he spent hot summers in Alabama. Even while they enjoyed childhood adventures, they also “learned about the danger of skin, how the hooded boogeymen, as we called them, would come and get us.” The memoir gets its title from an essay on the perils of driving while Black. “The in-betweens,” Loeb writes, “are when the police officer is about to step to the window when I am watching him from the rearview mirror and unsure about what will happen next.” His mother tried mightily to prepare him for these moments: “Mom said that even though I was only half Black, one drop of the blood made me Black enough.”
Engagingly delivered, candid reflections on heritage and identity.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781952271748
Page Count: 280
Publisher: West Virginia Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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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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IndieBound Bestseller
by Steve Martin illustrated by Harry Bliss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 17, 2020
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
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IndieBound Bestseller
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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