by John Waters ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 3, 2014
The book idles way too long, but once it takes off, it’s a sweet and funny ride.
Face it: Wouldn’t you rather strike out on the road with John Waters than Jack Kerouac?
If the answer is yes, then this book is for you, even if Waters (Role Models, 2011, etc.), the ever-flamboyant auteur-(Pink Flamingos, Hairspray et al) turned-writer, takes his sweet time getting going. For more than half of this account of his 2012 cross-country journey hitchhiking from Baltimore to San Francisco, the author imagines what lies in store, with dueling full-length novellas that spin best and worst case scenarios. Best: a never-ending thrill ride full of rich potheads, happy freaks and horny hunks, all of whom know and love his work. Worst: The trip west is seething with small-town homophobes, stage moms, crazed environmentalists and serial killers. The real story, once it arrives, is a welcome relief, as the truth is more hilarious and interesting than Waters’ nuttiest fantasies. He dealt with troubles he didn’t expect, like tedium or the art of making a marketable cardboard sign. (He eventually ditched his original sign, “I’m Not Psycho,” wisely realizing that “hitchhiking is not the time to be a comedian.”) Waters hitched rides with a preacher’s wife, a hay farmer and an indie band, and he struck up a budding bromance with a straight, young Maryland Republican city councilman. The author was grateful that, even in the hinterlands, C-list celebrity status could be a real asset and was even more touched by the kindness of people who didn't know him at all. Some—who apparently didn’t notice his BlackBerry, tracking device or designer sports jacket—even offered money, which he gently refused (“Yeah sure, I see her thinking, here’s a homeless person off his meds”).
The book idles way too long, but once it takes off, it’s a sweet and funny ride.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-29863-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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PROFILES
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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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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