by Edward Stanton ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
An engaging coming-of-age account that explores manhood across cultural boundaries.
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A memoir chronicles a young man’s travels in Mexico and Spain.
In this book, Stanton recounts his experiences with the Spanish language and Spanish-speaking countries. The early chapters are set in his 1950s California childhood, where he learned both idiomatic Spanish and a sense of masculinity through his interactions with undocumented Mexican immigrants. When the author reached his teen years, he ventured into the seediness of Tijuana, Mexico, visiting local sex workers and conversing with them, losing his virginity in the process. Later, he spent time living in other parts of Mexico. After college, he made his first visit to Spain, where he stayed for a while, returning in later years. The book delves into the cultural and political aspects of his travels—for instance, Stanton takes note of the repression of Franco’s government during the author’s early years in Spain and contrasts it with the socio-economic changes he found on his post-divorce visit more than a decade later. The work also examines the lessons in community and identity, particularly what it means to be a man, that Stanton absorbed through his cultural exchanges. The author is a lyrical writer (“More than immigrants they were like swallows migrating to California from their winter roost in Jalisco”), adopting a tone that suits the work’s nostalgic mood. Descriptions of his participation in iconic events, such as the running of the bulls or his first bullfight, are elegant and stand up to the inevitable comparisons to Steinbeck and Hemingway, who makes his own appearances throughout the text. Stanton employs the second person in his memoir, an unusual stylistic choice (“Your room opened onto the light-filled patio”), though there are awkward detours into other point-of-view language that can be slightly jarring (“As we watched those corridas, your friend taught you most of what you know about the bulls and the men who meet them”). The female characters, while plentiful and active in the narrative, do tend to feel secondary to the volume’s very male perspective. But as a story focused on the lives and experiences of men, the book achieves its goal and provides an enjoyable reading experience.
An engaging coming-of-age account that explores manhood across cultural boundaries.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-949003-47-5
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Waterside Productions
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Jennette McCurdy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 9, 2022
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
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The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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