by Gloria Vanderbilt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2004
More surface than substance.
In a gossipy tribute to romance’s irresistible lure, celebrity heiress Vanderbilt coyly recalls the many loves of her life.
Though Vanderbilt offers a psychological explanation for her constant quest for love, it seems more a perfunctory aside than a major revelation in this paean to the susceptible heart. Some of the material has been covered in her other work (A Mother’s Story, 1996, etc.): her happy but too-short marriage to Wyatt Cooper, who fathered her son, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, Wyatt’s early death, and the suicide of their other son Carter. Other sections are part of the public record concerning someone who’s been a headline-maker since childhood in the 1930s, when Aunt Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney went to court claiming that Gloria’s mother was unfit (there were rumors of lesbian attachments) and won, becoming Gloria’s legal guardian. Her absent mother had a lasting impact, admits Vanderbilt: “The love of my life was my mother. My search for love has and always will be to revive the dream of . . . obtaining the perfect mother to love me unerringly and unceasingly.” And it is this search, always energetic, always optimistic, she now chronicles. The list of men in her life is long and often illustrious. They include husbands Pat DeCicco, Leopold Stokowski, and Sidney Lumet; Howard Hughes, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, and Roald Dahl (amusingly misspelled throughout as “Raoul”). Except for the one to Cooper, her marriages proved to be mistakes: DeCicco was abusive; Stokowski was cold and self-absorbed; Lumet wanted children and at the time she didn’t, being too busy with her acting career. Her lovers have also often disappointed, but Vanderbilt is still as dewy-eyed about romance as any dreamy adolescent, asserting that there’s always a chance of meeting someone who will transform her life and that dreams often do come true. They certainly have for Vanderbilt, more often than not.
More surface than substance.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-6480-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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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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