by Jason Mulgrew ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 2, 2010
Fitfully funny, long on snark, short on substance.
Blogger and “Internet quasi-celebrity” Mulgrew delivers a bumptious memoir celebrating his wildly dysfunctional—but fun—childhood as a nerdy kid in a tough Philadelphia neighborhood.
The author is the son of a macho, chain-smoking laborer who declined to stop partying even after suffering a broken neck from an ill-advised late-night dive into shallow water in one memorable anecdote. Mulgrew’s world was characterized by bookies, casual violence and rampant alcoholism, but his tone is light, even celebratory, as he lovingly details the outrageous personalities of the larger-than-life characters who populated his gritty neighborhood. The author failed to excel at such locally exalted vocations as athletics or hell-raising, so he threw himself into more quiet pursuits like selling illegal fireworks and hustling at video-hockey tournaments. Mulgrew documents his struggles with Catholicism, Little League, attracting girls and maintaining respect in an entertainingly hapless fashion, but the narrative fails to cohere as a fully dimensional portrait or offer much insight into the social and family dynamics that engendered such goofy behavior. Ultimately it becomes just one thing after another—random fights, drinking binges, mysterious stab wounds, trips to jail. One comic set piece stands out: a Scotch bonnet pepper–eating tournament that leaves its participants writhing in agony, leaking mucous and begging for water and ice cream. Mulgrew includes many embarrassing family photos to buttress his remembrances, and the affection he feels toward his wayward subjects is palpable. However, the author’s reflexively snarky, self-deprecating voice—typical of Internet quasi-celebrity bloggers—becomes tiresome over the course of the book.
Fitfully funny, long on snark, short on substance.Pub Date: March 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-176665-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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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 Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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