The doyenne of afternoon comedy returns with more quirky reflections on life.
The author’s latest comes eight years after her last bestselling collection of humorous musings (The Funny Thing Is…, 2003, etc.), as well as after one wildly successful talk show, a brief stint on American Idol and the founding of a record label. While the present work largely represents more of the same from DeGeneres, fans will not be disappointed. This hodgepodge of self-help tips, adult(ish) stories, coloring-book pages for children of all ages and one hilarious haiku—“Haiku sounds like I’m / saying hi to someone named / Ku. Hi, Ku. Hello.”—displays throughout the author’s gift for capturing the absurd hilarity of internal monologue. As such, readers will expect the audiobook edition to amplify the humor of some of these vignettes that, on the page, elicit little more than quiet smirks. Many of the passages, like her advice on “How to Be a Supermodel”—“Get those lips out there. Purse your lips like you’re trying to sip out of a straw that someone keeps moving away from you…Be mysterious. Always pose with one hand in your pocket as if to say, ‘I’m so mysterious, this hand in my pocket could be a hook hand. You don’t know’ ”—deliver their comedic punch unaided. One of the more refreshing aspects of this miscellany is DeGeneres’ inclusion of her spouse, Portia de Rossi, whom she admires and gently chides as any partner might—e.g., her critique of de Rossi’s lotion mania: “Each kind says it has something special in it for your skin—aloe, shea butter, coconut, cocoa butter, vanilla, lemon extract. That’s not lotion. That’s one ingredient short of a Bundt cake.” Though DeGeneres doesn’t provide many laugh-out-loud moments, her trademark wit and openness shine through.
Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-446-58502-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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