by Julie Klam ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 18, 2017
Entertaining but shallow. Klam is perhaps too sensible a writer to care much about the filtered world of celebrities, and...
A collection of essays on our culture’s fascination with celebrities.
Klam (Friendkeeping: A Field Guide to the People You Love, Hate, and Can't Live Without, 2012, etc.) has done her share of celebrity journalism in magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and Glamour. In her fifth book, she chronicles her interviews with one-time or sort-of celebrities like Timothy Hutton, whose 15 minutes came when he won an Oscar in 1980 at age 20 for Ordinary People, and Griffin Dunne, who starred in An American Werewolf in London. They come across as perfectly pleasant, polite guys with little apparent interest in the subject of celebrity. The author professes a fascination with celebrities that began when she was a teenager plastering her bedroom walls with pages from Tiger Beat, but by this point, that fascination has clearly faded, and she seems to be proceeding dutifully through all the expected bases. She observes strangers taking selfies outside the restaurant where Seinfeld was filmed, speaks with Quentin Tarantino’s publicist, discusses the necessity of plastic surgery for celebrities, frets about the Kardashians and their unearned fame, and interviews former Mets player R.A. Dickey, forgetting to turn on her tape recorder, with a resulting chapter that’s more about her than him. The book is padded with dozens of recollections of celebrity sightings by Klam’s friends and acquaintances. In the book’s most pleasurable moments, the author discusses her Aunt Mattie, an unabashed reality TV show fan who enjoys sitting in her La-Z-Boy with her dog and some licorice and pretzels to watch and muse on the complicated relationships in Love & Hip-Hop: Hollywood.
Entertaining but shallow. Klam is perhaps too sensible a writer to care much about the filtered world of celebrities, and her fundamental indifference to the subject, no matter how she struggles to overcome it, makes the book seem less than essential.Pub Date: July 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59463-136-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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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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