by Jane Binns ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13, 2018
A candid but bumpy account of a woman’s search for happiness.
A divorced mother explores the dating scene and herself in this debut memoir.
Binns, a 33-year-old clairvoyant, left her husband of 12 years after feeling invisible. In her book, she describes the dizzying succession of high-drama relationships that followed, from which she protected her 2-year-old son, Shane. Bouncing between overlapping men, the author assessed each one with sarcasm, self-doubt, and more than a little prickliness. (“What cave had he crawled out of?” she wondered when asked to explain her clairvoyance training.) She recalls alternately love-bombing and punishing her dithering partners, asking them to remember her birthday, then removing all traces of them in her life—then checking to see if they noticed. Binns begged for attention, then ignored phone calls; forgave—or rather, overlooked—traits that later repulsed her; and ascribed motivations to men without discussion. The author recounts that her writing and painting, moments with her son, and the occasional true intimacy—sometimes with Vietnam veteran Steve—provided some joy. She eventually shed her insecurity and alienation, confronted her memories of her parents’ terrible fights, endured two deaths, and found meaning in being a mother. In her wide-ranging memoir, Binns’ writing style is both canny and witty. She delivers acerbic comments about her own behavior (“It made me queasy to think of sex as payment, but it wasn’t as if I wasn’t getting anything out of that”). But her self-loathing and insatiable approval-seeking eventually become a bit oppressive. Self-obsessed (“He did not love me enough to…love himself”), hypersensitive to rejection, and quickly immersed in liaisons, she would find fault and tear up mementos while hiding her anger. Such morbid loneliness and interpersonal myopia bred contradictions. “How dare he judge me?” she asked about a man questioning her having an affair while she was married. Yet she considered another man’s extramarital turmoil “laughable.” She also discusses her so-called friends, who “tuned into my life for their weekly entertainment.” In these pages, the author genuinely relates her suffering and how she safeguarded her son’s welfare, and the book ends strongly on a ray of hope. But many readers will likely find it difficult to follow Binns’ painful journey.
A candid but bumpy account of a woman’s search for happiness.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-433-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Share your opinion of this book
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
Awards & Accolades
Likes
21
Our Verdict
GET IT
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
winner
New York Times Bestseller
IndieBound Bestseller
National Book Award Winner
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Ta-Nehisi Coates
BOOK REVIEW
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Elie Wiesel
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.