Readers who never tire of Rivers and her distinctive take on the world will lap up the newest entree from the octogenarian...
A Dear Diary–style recounting of the author’s day-to-day professional and personal life.
Rivers’ (I Hate Everyone…Starting With Me, 2013, etc.) merciless, yearlong skewering of the universe begins Jan. 1 and proceeds through the year. Sparing no one, including herself, the author employs her typically ribald take on the numerous individuals, groups or topics encountered while the author travels from her home in New York to gigs around the country and vacations in Mexico or the Hamptons. A sampling of the real or imagined scenarios Rivers recounts in her trademark style include: Anne Frank’s diary-keeping skills; Barbara Streisand’s looks; dating services; Paula Deen and the N-word; her ideas for new TV shows; Kirstie Alley’s weight (“Today is National Pig Day and I completely forgot to call [her]! I’ll send her a note. Or a bucket of slop. She’s not that fussy”); J. Edgar Hoover’s fashion choices (“J. Edgar Hoover and I were very close. In fact, we were the same size. I used to lend him my clothes for special occasions. He looked especially fetching in a simple summer shift with matching cloche and open-toed-shoes”). Rivers also includes numerous photos showing her swigging from a bottle of vodka with cigarette and prescription pill bottle in hand; holding up a “will work for food sign”; dressed as a parody of the twerking Miley Cyrus; and decorating a Christmas tree with an Orthodox Jewish friend. It’s all grand fun for the author, but after a while, the daily entries read like snippets of a stand-up routine. For a live audience, Rivers may astound with her stories and blue language, but when continually lobbed on the page, the shtick grows predictable and stale.
Readers who never tire of Rivers and her distinctive take on the world will lap up the newest entree from the octogenarian comedian. Others will want to take a pass.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-425-26902-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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