An amusing stand-up bit buckles under the weight of a book-length treatment.
A successful comedian tries to square gender stereotypes with the realities of how women really live.
Shlesinger, a winner of NBC’s Last Comic Standing, calls her debut book a celebration of womanhood, though her own life and stand-up routine have hardly been paragons of feminist resistance. She locates her moment of awakening in a 2015 episode in which a male comic mocked a fellow female comic. Emboldened to seek equality, she sets out to define and deconstruct the “have-it-all” mentality forced on American women, the obsession to have the perfect partner, profession, and physique. However, despite her profession and stated goal to increase empathy, the author’s recent realizations are neither especially funny nor noteworthy. Shlesinger leans on hackneyed clichés, such as dissecting the so-called guys’ girl, only to reveal she once hid behind the stereotype of the sports-loving, beer-drinking woman. A handful of the anecdotes about dating and workplace drama are humorous, but most rely on the dated conventions the author supposedly seeks to abolish. Some profanity-laden diatribes come dangerously close to being offensive for their lack of nuance about race and sexual orientation. The takeaway messages of the book are important: cultivate confidence, develop the courage to be different, refuse catty competition with other women. Unfortunately, the intended lessons are often lost in the author’s frenetic chatter—e.g., an entire chapter describing how women should text men—and memoir-style meanderings through her childhood and adolescence, many of which lack resolution. In a handbook seemingly meant for teens, the faux adolescent tone feels forced and obscures what could be an empowering message about how it is never too late to counter the reductive nature of stereotypes. Instead of instructions for how to grow up, this reads like a series of theories not yet fully formed.
An amusing stand-up bit buckles under the weight of a book-length treatment.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60286-323-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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