by Katherine Lanpher ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2006
Tempting fare for anyone who’s ever wondered: Who am I and how did I get here?
Essays by a displaced over-40 divorcee with deep Midwestern roots who moves to Manhattan.
Onetime Minnesota Public Radio reporter Lanpher decided as far back as her teens that she would never live in New York because “I didn’t want to pay the price.” The point of reference: a college acquaintance with an intimidating Park Avenue address who liked to boast that “she had her own shrink.” Nonetheless, the day came: Lanpher was offered the job of co-host of Al Franken’s Air America radio show and—on a leap day, Feb. 29th—made the jump, renting out her beloved, cozy house in Saint Paul and moving to an apartment in Greenwich Village. Initially, these essays have a somewhat predictable tone; she is, to all New Yorkers she meets, from cab drivers and deli countermen to cold-staring strangers, the stereotypical out-of-towner, little lost farm girl in the concrete jungle, etc. She doesn’t know enough to not hail a cab going the wrong way on a one-way street; she uses odd words—like “sack” to mean “bag.” As far as she’s concerned, it’s one egregious faux pas after another. But behind her wit and perspective, Lanpher rallies; she’ll learn how to act, how to dress, how to talk like a native and properly scorn the tourists. Forcing its way into the picture, however, is some serious introspection, about her failed marriage, about her childlessness (she wonders, by choice?). Finally, after two years, she finds herself “going home” on the subway in Manhattan.
Tempting fare for anyone who’s ever wondered: Who am I and how did I get here?Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-8212-5830-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Springboard Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
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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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