A bubbly, delicious treat for anyone whose horizons aren’t bounded by the ordinary.
Charming debut memoir traces an Australian woman’s off-the-wall plan to become a local in the City of Light by way of real estate.
For years, Nielsen dreamed of calling Paris home. During one visit, while gazing out a balcony window and fantasizing about ordering rabbit from a butcher shop in perfect French, an epiphany struck. She would buy an apartment, et voilà—an outsider she would be no longer. She convinced her stubbornly realistic yet doting husband Jack to commit to the hunt, and off they went with son Ellery in tow. They were optimistic at first, each hazy lead inspiring visions of lofty windows, parquet floors, kitchens stocked with copper pots and redolent with the aroma of well-cooked duck soufflé. A parade of real-estate agencies exposed them to Parisians’ inimitable ways with conversation, culture and decorating—but no suitable apartment. Nielsen, who had romanticized France into an urbane Everest, saw each small real-estate setback as emblematic of a personal character flaw. Sundry friends and strangers reinforced her self-doubt. From Claude, the aunt of an acquaintance who exuded a regal elegance befitting Catherine Deneuve crossed with the Arc de Triomphe, to a grizzly sidewalk artist who painted with the same vivacity with which he addressed his patrons, everyone she met seemed to incarnate a Parisian essence to which she could only aspire. Nielsen’s narrative describes multitudes of apartment showings, briefly interrupted by short, amusing recollections of trips that reinforced the depths of her commitment to la ville lumière. Her love is not one of fleeting lust or random affection, but a more enduring emotion, and her persistence and dedication are finally rewarded with an apartment on the rue de Rivoli. “My world is suddenly bigger,” she writes. “From now on I’m part of two universes.”
A bubbly, delicious treat for anyone whose horizons aren’t bounded by the ordinary.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-38355-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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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