A heartwarming account, ripe for discussion in women’s book clubs and women’s studies classes.
An in-depth look at the enduring bond of friendship among a tightly knit group of middle-class Midwestern women born in the early 1960s.
Through his popular “Moving On” column in the Wall Street Journal, which focuses on transitions in women’s friendships, Zaslow (co-author: The Last Lecture, 2008) was introduced to the women featured here. The author briefly profiles all 11, but avoids an overcrowded portrait by focusing on four: strait-laced Marilyn, fun-loving Karla, outspoken Kelly and Sheila, whose death at 22 remains mysterious. The author spent time with them, looked at their photo albums, read their teenage notes and diaries, met their families and pored over the reply-all e-mails that have kept the group in close touch for the past decade. Zaslow also attended their annual reunion in 2007, an event he vividly recounts here. He records their happy reminiscences of high-school hijinks, their sometimes bittersweet recollections of adolescent misadventures, their connections with each other as their lives took separate paths and their continued warm support for each other as major events—marriages, births, divorces, deaths—impacted their lives. When breast cancer struck two of them in middle age, Zaslow shows the emotional help and encouragement they received from the others. Although his portrait of the group is mostly positive, he does not overlook the negative aspects of adolescent exclusivity, revealing how other classmates viewed them as a snobbish clique. Zaslow also reports briefly on research that has highlighted the difference between male bonding and female bonding, and the importance of friendship in the lives of women.
A heartwarming account, ripe for discussion in women’s book clubs and women’s studies classes.Pub Date: April 21, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-592-40445-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
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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