Thoughtful, engaging, and informative essays from a writer to watch.
Astute, perceptive forays into America’s nooks and crannies.
In her debut book’s titular essay, about revolutionary deep brain stimulation for patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder, Kisner writes that the barrier “between the physical world and the spiritual world wears thin and becomes porous.” She continues, “the thin places I’ve known aren’t always places, per se. Sometimes a thin place appears between people. Sometimes it happens only inside you.” Combining reportage and the personal essay, the author often finds herself involved in the subjects she discusses. In “Attunement,” she recounts when a “handful of kids delivered my soul to Jesus at summer camp.” But when she was 12, God just “vanished. I didn’t know why.” The essay traces her religious pilgrimage and fascination with Kierkegaard’s “tract on faith and doubt,” Fear and Trembling, and her “late-breaking phantom limb syndrome of the soul.” In “Jesus Raves,” Kisner chronicles her up-close and personal experiences with a church’s hip outreach to young people (“they could be J. Crew models, but they are pastors”). “Stitching” focuses on “ ‘The Bloggernacle,’ a contingent of Mormon mothers who have taken over a sizable piece of the online aspirational lifestyle industry” with their anti-Trump message. “Habitus,” one of the best pieces, roams widely, from a debutante ball in Laredo, Texas, to border immigration to the TV show Say Yes to the Dress to matters concerning the author’s sexuality. In “The Big Empty,” Kisner explores the “enormous, hypersensory multimedia installations” of Ann Hamilton. As a good reporter, the author never judges the people she writes about, often finding common ground with them. She admires the “strange beauty” of the Shakers’ buildings and the “ecstatic, cathartic” quirkiness of their worship—“they simply shook and shook, overcome.” Later, Kisner joined in with a “little dance,” a “wiggle, an homage but also a mini-catharsis of the fine posture and right angles of the morning.”
Thoughtful, engaging, and informative essays from a writer to watch.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-27464-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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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