by Doris Roberts with Danelle Morton ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003
An agreeable visit with a chatty old friend.
With wry humor and good sense, the Emmy-winning Italian-American Mom of Everybody Loves Raymond offers advice, recipes, and reminiscences about personal and professional good and bad times.
This is not one of those linear memoirs that proceed from humble birth to exalted present. Instead, Roberts sidetracks here, detours there, but cumulatively offers up a lively if discursive account of her life. She accompanies each chapter with an appropriate recipe, usually an example of good Italian home cooking like her potato salad or lasagna. Beginning with an assessment of Marie, the character she plays in the hit comedy, Roberts revisits particular times, experiences, and relationships. Now in her 70s, expected when young to marry early and stay home raising the children, she admits to loving Marie because if things had turned out differently she too could have been such an overbearing mother. In other chapters, Roberts describes the unusual annual Christmas party she throws for the cast (“the greed party, where guests scheme to get the gifts they want”), recalls how she landed the part; and expresses the satisfaction she gets from still being able to work. Without self-pity she describes a lonely childhood: her taciturn, critical, and divorced mother had to work, and Doris was left with grandparents who regarded her as imposition. Only an uncle gave her a sense of worth that enabled Roberts to survive her first marriage (to a man she supported while he went to law school) and difficult early attempts to become an actress. Her second husband was the love of her life, she has one son and three grandchildren, and she happily details the joys of motherhood. She seasons everything with insights she picked up along the way: the value of perseverance, a positive attitude (think pink rather than angry red), and accepting who you are.
An agreeable visit with a chatty old friend.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-31226-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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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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