Personal, reflective moments that reveal various aspects of an actress and activist’s life.
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. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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