A comprehensive account of one woman’s love life that loses its overarching narrative in the details.
In her debut memoir, Prada recounts the frustrations and anxieties of dating men in her 30s.
The author freely admits that she’s a “late bloomer”—a single schoolteacher who, at 30, lives with her hard-of-hearing grandmother in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this book, she recounts a string of unsuccessful relationships, with each man neatly encapsulated in his own chapter. There’s James, her first kiss; men with fanciful pseudonyms, such as “Dante Prosecco” and “Rich Calamari”; an array of Irish beaus (Seamus, Finn, Connor); and a Japanese surfer named Hiro. “No matter where I was, I was a magnet for foreigners,” she writes. “What can I say? I’m a sucker for someone funny who also has an accent.” Prada gives a complete account of the way the men entered her life—through school, via a mutual friend, or, more often than not, while drinking at an Irish bar—as well as the various confusions and insecurities that come with courtship and, inevitably, the breakups. One engaging story recounts a relationship that was particularly disastrous: at one point, Prada had to track down and steal back a car from an untrustworthy ex. But other accounts make for less-compelling reading. The book is more of a dry catalog of romantic happenings and the back-and-forth of flirty conversation than a narrative with memorable scenes. Tonally, it reads like a chatty monologue delivered over glasses of pinot grigio, complete with self-deprecating asides, constant worrying, and evaluations of the quality of men’s teeth. Prada sometimes strikes notes of humor—“Send me your poor, emotionally and geographically unavailable, huddled masses, yearning for credit or codependency, or just yearning to break free (probably from prison)”—or pathos (“How long had [he] been going around telling people…that he was trying to shake me, like some annoying piece of lint from a fuzzy sweater?”). But she focuses so heavily on the intricacies of each romantic entanglement that she leaves little room for deeper self-reflection. In this regard, the book’s resolution is no exception—like the author’s relationships, it’s ultimately unsatisfying.
A comprehensive account of one woman’s love life that loses its overarching narrative in the details.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5246-6860-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
