An average game with no triple word scores.
The co-author of the bestselling Everything SCRABBLE© returns with a motley collection of anecdotes, advice, and autobiography—all relating, more or less, to the game he loves.
Williams’ text follows his decades of experience as executive director of the National SCRABBLE Association, a tenure that ended recently due, in part, to the profound changes in the landscape of the gaming world. There is a little bit of everything here, including an appendix of proscribed game words (the naughty, the insulting), a mildly ranting chapter about grammar and usage, and a chapter that includes advice on how to tell someone that he or she has committed a solecism. Williams tells us a bit about his own playing career—he had early success, then quit studying so much and fell from grace—and about his joining the SCRABBLE team with owner Hasbro Inc. He relates stories about the spread of the competitive game, even into schools. Middle school, he and his team discover, is the best level. (A high school kid once called him a dork.) There is a dull chapter about adult championships, and there are some near-fawning chapters about the author’s experiences with TV and movie celebrities. (Actor Jack Black is a devoted player; on his show, Jimmy Kimmel played against scholastic champions; the producers of the 2001 film The Wedding Planner ignored his counsel.) Williams also tells about declining an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart because he feared an ambush, and he includes an awkward section about why men/boys seem to win all the championships. The author chronicles his interviews with some top women players, who, unfortunately, don’t shed much light on this issue. Williams takes a few pokes at some of the Hasbro executives he worked for (he also praises many others) and seems quite happy that his appearance on an episode of Martha Stewart’s show is still on YouTube.
An average game with no triple word scores.Pub Date: June 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-87140-773-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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
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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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