By concentrating on telling a colorful, absorbing story rather than proving a point, Herrera moves and transports us.
Memories of a chaotic, peripatetic, and often magical childhood in the 1940s and ’50s.
In the preface to this excellent memoir—Herrera’s first, after acclaimed biographies of Frida Kahlo, Henri Matisse, Maxim Gorky, and others—the author explains that she and her sister, in their 80s, have never been able to decide whether their mother was wonderful or terrible. “Our terrible mother gave [us] a wonderful life,” she writes. “And, she was not the only terrible mother.” Both of their parents, each married multiple times and only briefly to one another, were members of a class her mother called “upper bohemia.” Born into privilege from about 1908 to 1920, these free spirits dedicated themselves to artistic and intellectual pursuits as well as to their own pleasure. When it came to raising children, they were usually inconsistent and haphazard. Herrera’s parents “were stars within their own community. They were talented and intelligent, but their most important asset was their beauty.” For the remainder of the book, the author slips beneath the surface of her childhood, spent on Cape Cod and in Manhattan, Boston, and Mexico. She maintains the perspective she had on events at that time, vividly evoking the little girl at the center of this story: her curiosity, pain, constant concern about her weight, disappointment in her father, and idolization of her mother. In 1950, when the girls were with their father in Cape Cod, their mother appeared in a car she called the “Coche de Mama” and drove them straight down to Mexico. The author’s accounts of the drive and the years in Mexico are highly cinematic, and Herrera avoids the excessive commentary, analysis, blame, and self-pity common in this type of memoir, allowing readers directly into the experience. In a satisfying epilogue, the author fills in the rest of the story up to the present day. The black-and-white photos attest to the beauty of the settings and all the people in them.
By concentrating on telling a colorful, absorbing story rather than proving a point, Herrera moves and transports us.Pub Date: June 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-9821-0528-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
PROFILES
An intriguing examination of the complexity of female power in a variety of relationships.
A collection of personal journal entries from the feminist writer that explores power dynamics and “a subject [she] kept coming back to: women strong in public, weak in private.”
Cultural critic and essayist Roiphe (Cultural Reporting and Criticism/New York Univ.; The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End, 2016, etc.), perhaps best known for the views she expressed on victimization in The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism (1994), is used to being at the center of controversy. In her latest work, the author uses her personal journals to examine the contradictions that often exist between the public and private lives of women, including her own. At first, the fragmented notebook entries seem overly scattered, but they soon evolve into a cohesive analysis of the complex power dynamics facing women on a daily basis. As Roiphe shares details from her own life, she weaves in quotes from the writings of other seemingly powerful female writers who had similar experiences, including Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, and Hillary Clinton. In one entry, Roiphe theorizes that her early published writings were an attempt to “control and tame the narrative,” further explaining that she has “so long and so passionately resisted the victim role” because she does not view herself as “purely a victim” and not “purely powerless.” However, she adds, that does not mean she “was not facing a man who was twisting or distorting his power; it does not mean that the wrongness, the overwhelmed feeling was not there.” Throughout the book, the author probes the question of why women so often subjugate their power in their private lives, but she never quite finds a satisfying answer. The final entry, however, answers the question of why she chose to share these personal journal entries with the public: “To be so exposed feels dangerous, but having done it, I also feel free.”
An intriguing examination of the complexity of female power in a variety of relationships.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2801-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Hard-edged, tough-minded, and unabashedly opinionated, but a refreshingly frank record of a controversial life.
From African-American economist and author Sowell, a forthright memoir of growing up the hard way in Harlem—without a father, but with an admirable refusal to compromise one’s principles.
As a grown man, Sowell can now discern helpful guideposts (that would later determine his success) in what was an often frightening and uncertain childhood. He is grateful that he left the South too young to be subjected to its pervasive racism, that he was in public school when its education was still excellent, and that he became a professor before affirmative action called into question many black accomplishments. Born in 1929 in North Carolina, he never knew his own father and was adopted soon after his birth by an aunt. He left the South after an idyllic childhood and moved to Harlem with his mother and two older sisters in 1939. There he entered the local public school, and was soon an outstanding, as well as an outspoken, student. The family was proud of his accomplishments, but when he was accepted at the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, they objected to the hours he spent studying instead of earning money, and he had to drop out. Drafted into the Marines during the Korean War, he took advantage of the GI bill to finish high school, as well as attend college, graduating from Harvard. The following years—spent teaching at colleges like Cornell or working in Washington while he finished his dissertation—were often rocky. And he describes his run-ins with obstructive bureaucrats, careerist academics, and bigoted racists, encounters sometimes exacerbated by his often-unpopular political opinions. Though Sowell writes movingly of his son who was a late talker, this is not a personal memoir, but rather an account of a philosophical and professional evolution shaped by a lifetime of challenging experiences.
Hard-edged, tough-minded, and unabashedly opinionated, but a refreshingly frank record of a controversial life.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-86464-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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