Funny, frothy and fabulous.
Mall-rat moves to the city, becomes a Rock Chick, then rediscovers her inner nerd.
In high school, the author sported “a perm that was extreme even by mideighties New Jersey standards, rendering my hair as dense and impenetrable as a boxwood hedge.” She dreamed of a glamorous life, but as she entered adulthood, it seemed the world had anything but glamour in store for her. After dropping out of the University of Delaware, Dunn moved in with her parents and went to work as a fact-checker for an ad agency. This was the kind of job to which a gal wore a plaid suit with giant shoulder pads, a string tie and a hairspray helmet. Bored stiff, Dunn leapt at a chance to interview for an editorial-assistant post at Rolling Stone. Charming the higher-ups with her decided lack of Ivy League polish, she got the gig and soon had her own byline. With the new job came a fantasy urban life: countless men, countless clubs, not to mention Ray Charles serenading her in an elevator and Christian Aguilera sending her a bouquet of flowers. Eventually, though, Dunn realized that this ultra-cool existence was not for her. She began hanging out with her mom and spending most nights in her apartment watching documentaries. Despite the unwieldy subtitle and the distracting how-to-interview-a-celebrity interludes, this debut memoir isn’t really about working at Rolling Stone. It’s about becoming acquainted with, and accepting, your true self. Dunn is a master of character development, capturing the essence of a person in just a few, well-chosen details, and she deftly deploys dialogue. Indeed, her prose transforms the predictable plotline of the last 100 pages—as her sisters and friends churn out babies, Dunn dates many losers, and her biological clock ticks ever louder—into something magical.
Funny, frothy and fabulous.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-084364-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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