by Franchesca Ramsey ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 22, 2018
An admirable exploration of the rapidly morphing boundaries of social mores and online outrage; the author helpfully points...
The host of MTV’s web series Decoded chronicles her difficulties navigating the early days of social media and her evolution as an advocate for social justice.
Ramsey has a solid media platform: A comedian, actress, and blogger, she was a writer and correspondent for the Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore and has been featured on NPR, the BBC, and Anderson Cooper 360. With a program in the works with Comedy Central, the author offers her story as an illustration of why, in today’s overheated social and political environment, it is more important than ever to pay close attention to how we communicate with each other. Early on she admits that she is a product of social media: “I have a long and complicated history with the internet. I basically grew up online.” She built her first website while still in middle school. By high school, she had purchased her own domain name and began blogging. Ramsey was an early fan of YouTube and began making videos for fun. “I know the exact date I went from being a nobody, minding my own business in my corporate retail job,” she writes, “to being ‘internet famous’—and inadvertently making a lot of girls cry.” That moment came after she posted a video, “Shit White Girls Say…to Black Girls,” which went “super-massive, mainstream-news viral.” Ramsey’s narrative is a snappy mix of the funny, sad, and horrifying incidents that have shaped her life, many of which demonstrate lessons that can apply to a wide variety of modern-day readers. For the unwoke among us, Ramsey thoughtfully includes “Franchesca’s Simple Explanations of Not-So-Simple Concepts,” a “social-justice glossary” that includes definitions of such terms as “gender binary,” “cisgender,” “Latinx,” and “Slacktivism.”
An admirable exploration of the rapidly morphing boundaries of social mores and online outrage; the author helpfully points the way toward better communication.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5387-6103-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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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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