A black actress and activist chronicles her life story and speaks out about issues important to her.
As in many memoirs, Union—known for her roles in such films as Bring It On and Deliver Us from Eva and currently on the TV show Being Mary Jane—begins by remembering episodes from her childhood that show her insecurities, vulnerabilities, and naiveté when it came to things like boys, puberty, and making friends in grade school. Readers learn about her efforts with her hair, fitting in as a black person in an almost all-white school, and the process of learning about her own body. A third of the way into the narrative, the author tackles the more serious moments in her life, particularly the day she suffered the horrific experience of burglary and rape at the shoe store where she worked. “After I was raped,” she writes, “…I didn’t leave my house for a whole year unless I had to go to court or to therapy.” Though she has since become a strong advocate for sexual assault victims, the author shifts to the issues of color and racism in America, of raising her stepchildren in a world where young black men are considered dangerous regardless of who their parents are, and the death of a close friend from cancer. With honesty and humor, Union bares her soul and shares her levels of insecurity, the difficulties of being a black woman in Hollywood, and the way fame has changed her life. She embraces many multilayered issues in these intimate essays, giving readers glimpses of insight into her soul. However, some will wish that the author explored many of these issues further, and those unfamiliar with her work in film and on TV will find some of her references obscure.
Personal, reflective moments that reveal various aspects of an actress and activist’s life.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-269398-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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