by Jude Angelini ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 23, 2014
A grating collection from a poor-man’s Howard Stern.
An explicit collection of stories from the host of The All Out Show on Sirius.
On Angelini’s radio show, guests are likely to do anything. One—“a little punk rock, porn chick”—urinated on him as foreplay, which must have made for great radio. The author originally self-published this book, though apparently there was enough demand to attract a publisher. Nearly every one of these stories involves impersonal sex either aided or thwarted by drugs that overcome the inherent numbness of the act or reinforce it. “Drug sex is great,” he writes. “The only thing better is love sex. But if you can’t get that, drug sex is a nice consolation prize.” There is little or no “love sex” in these pages, though Angelini expresses plenty of love for his daughter, who lives with her mother, whom he misses. He dedicates the book to both of them and claims that he “figured it out too late.” And what did he figure out? It’s hard to tell, though he plainly has something of the romantic in him: “Maybe some lady will pick me up, dust me off, and see me for the man I am and not the whore I’ve been acting like.” By the end of this series of short chapters, there is no sense that he is closer to any sort of transformation, though he seems as benumbed by the depravity of a life without purpose or pleasure as readers will be. As for humor, here’s a taste: “Every time I go to Flint, I end up at LLT’s, this grimy little strip club on Saginaw. They do a five-dollar lap dance, and I know you shouldn’t go bargain hunting for your tattoos or sex workers, but I just can’t turn down a good deal….Five bucks in Flint is like ten bucks in Detroit. It’s the Tijuana of the Midwest.”
A grating collection from a poor-man’s Howard Stern.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1476789309
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
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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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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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