by Jen Kirkman ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 12, 2016
Genuine, intelligent, and candid.
A 40-something stand-up comedian’s blisteringly honest and hilarious account of a life still “majorly under construction.”
As she neared the end of her 30s, Kirkman (I Can Barely Take Care of Myself: Tales From a Happy Life Without Kids, 2013) suddenly found herself divorced. Her career was where she wanted it, and she was now “in love with [herself].” However, her failed marriage made her uncomfortably aware that her life was far from perfect. Once she realized that the libidinal lack she experienced while married had nothing to do with her hormones or undiagnosed depression, she opened herself to exploring the unknowns of adulthood. As "Jen Cougar Mellencamp,” she had a fling with a 23-year-old musician too young to remember Kurt Cobain. She also learned how to deal with her own anxieties about living alone through an attempt to set up a home alarm system that made “a creep smashing [her] window” look like less of a disaster in comparison. Kirkman came to embrace the fact that she was a renter, or, as she saw it, someone who once a month gave her money to “a nice blond lady” rather than a bank as did her married friends with mortgages. She was also able to finally admit to the liberating value of having a friendship-with-benefits relationship and of not worrying about what others thought when she stayed home on New Year’s Eve and went to bed by 9 p.m. When Kirkman broke up with the man she calls the “Ab-Master,” it was without regret for what could have been and without fear that she would find another age-appropriate partner. “I want[ed] someone to relax with…not rebuild,” she writes. Like her idol and friend, the late Joan Rivers, Kirkman offers no excuses for the freedom-loving woman she is or for her focus on building a career as a successful stand-up comic. Her life may appear chaotic and her lifestyle choices unconventional, but both are as uniquely individual as her book.
Genuine, intelligent, and candid.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7027-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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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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
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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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