A simple exercise comprised of equal parts crass, snarky humor and narcissistic blather.
Actress Mollen delivers a collection of 15 raunchy essays.
A sampling of a few of the titles within this assemblage: “Behind Every Crazy Woman, There’s an Even More Batshit Mother”; “The Birthday Whore”; “Hand Jobs: The Fine Art of Getting a Mani-Pedi Next to Your Husband’s Ex (Who Hates You)”; “Chicks Before Dicks”; “Nobody Wants to be Your Fucking Bridesmaid”; and “You Were Molested.” Granted, Mollen warns readers regarding her blunt views: “There is zero reason to be ashamed of announcing and acting on your real feelings. Life is too short for bullshit. I’m thirty-three, and my tits drop about half an inch a year. In other words, it’s all downhill from here.” Called the funniest woman on Twitter by the Huffington Post, the author freely throws off her few inhibitions throughout these pieces. Wading into Mollen’s essays eventually creates reader fatigue akin to being cornered by a self-centered bore at a cocktail party. The author is unrelentingly candid. A passage from the essay titled “One Shade of Grey” explains Mollen’s attempt at spicing up her marriage (to fellow actor Jason Biggs) with a series of sex toys and enhancements. Here and elsewhere, the author demonstrates her penchant for humor in the vein of Sarah Silverman’s most X-rated material, but Mollen is simply not as clever. “Sometimes I’d contemplated writing a movie, then stop and buy something online instead,” she writes. “I never saw myself as a writer. I have horrible grammar and can’t spell to save my life. I never had an English teacher single me out or imply that I showed any promise beyond being a B+ student.” Perhaps the author should stick to acting.
A simple exercise comprised of equal parts crass, snarky humor and narcissistic blather.Pub Date: June 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-04168-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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.
bookshelf
