by George Burns with Hal Goldman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 7, 1991
Burns's latest finds the 95-year-old cigar-puffer as witty, if not quite as sharp, as ever. Burns has no complaints about his health, although since his last bestseller (All My Best Friends, 1989) he's had to have three dentists repair his bridge, has acquired a hearing aid, and has had a cataract removed. The comedian rambles this time out, with most of his humor turning on old age, forgetfulness, sex, doctors, his daily routine and bridge game at the ``Club,'' dinner dates, stage and TV appearances (he now uses a chair after the first ten minutes), and jokes (``What kind of a nut loves to watch topless dancers? A chestnut''). He also writes of adjusting his humor to advancing age and keeping it appropriate (a fiasco on French TV had him touring three different Paris nightclubs, displaying performers' bare bosoms to the home audience—``Everyone makes mistakes''), tells some of his favorite funny stories (not jokes, but stories that might have happened), and comments on actors' insecurity and how he holds back his emotions in public (``maybe I hold back too much''). Burns also gives advice about money and marriage and some signs that old age may be creeping up, suggests that ``If you really believe in something, don't let anyone talk you out of it,'' and advises, ``Don't retire.'' He looks forward to his Hundredth Birthday appearance at the London Palladium—which is already booked. Gracious and rewarding—but not as strongly focused as his last two. Maybe Burns peaked at 94.... (Black & white photographs- -not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1991
ISBN: 0-399-13695-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1991
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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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