by H. O. Tanager ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 2014
A beguiling play-by-play about a vibrant literary happening.
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A hilarious account of the 2011 National Poetry Slam competition that illuminates a raucous subculture of competitive versifying from the inside.
Part beatnik culturefest and part bowling league, poetry slams involve teams of bards declaiming three-minute individual or group poems in front of randomly chosen judges and an audience of cheering, booing and drinking poetry aficionados. Tanager, a poet, led her four-woman team from Boise, Idaho, to compete against 71 other teams at the 2011 National Poetry Slam in Boston. Her fizzy reportage brings to vivid life this unlikeliest of American sporting events, detailing the pre-slam jitters and practice sessions; the behind-the-scenes clash of egos and gossipy backstabbing; and the quagmire of soggy identity politics. It also covers the poets’ last-minute strategizing over which poems to recite in order to sway fickle judges and audiences; the exhilaration of victory and the demoralization of loss to lesser, trendier poets; and the oblivion of booze and dancing at the afterparty. (“I’ll never leave you again, Beer!” the author vows after a painful defeat.) Tanager’s loose-limbed narrative, unfolding in a series of brief feuilletons, has a breezy, chatty tone and sprinkles the episodes from the slam with lively excursions into the food, fashions and harmless flirtations swirling around it. She’s alive to the absurdities of the scene, rolling her eyes at poetic self-importance (her own included) and lampooning preachy issue poems (“An Open Letter to that Bad Person I Read About in a Magazine”). Yet she takes the art form seriously, limns the empty spot in the soul that drives poets to perfect their craft and expose it to the world, and celebrates hard-won moments of compelling expression. There’s not much poetry in the book, but Tanager compensates with prose that is, by turns, funny, vehement, self-deprecating and gorgeous. At daybreak in an airplane, for example, she writes, “a glorious and silent choreographed battle of gold and fuchsia, pulse and vibration, grows brighter and brighter, huge and symphonic below me.” Alas, the book’s awful title will put off some readers, but those who persevere will find a whip-smart, wise and entertaining read.
A beguiling play-by-play about a vibrant literary happening.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1502758989
Page Count: 282
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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