by Kenya Hunt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 8, 2020
A powerful collection that is very much of the present moment of resistance but will also endure.
Essays highlighting the successes, challenges, and perseverance of Black women in the 2010s.
“It’s a wondrous thing to be Black,” writes Hunt, a trailblazing global fashion editor and style director. In her debut book, she reflects on “a decade’s worth of personal and cultural milestones.” What made the last decade an “age of Black Girl Magic”? An internet boom, a new wave of feminism, a renaissance of Black creativity, and “the first-person essay economy” combined to give Black women heightened visibility, which Hunt and her co-essayists celebrate while noting how the magic of ordinary Black women began to “get left out, lost.” A quarter of the essays in Hunt’s collection are penned by others writing candidly on their personal, professional, and political journeys. These include Ebele Okobi, Facebook’s public policy director for Africa, the Middle East, and Turkey, who reflects on the loss of her brother, who was killed by police in California. Taken together, the essays form a chorus of Black diasporic voices across continents, covering the politics of Black hair, self-acceptance and White beauty standards, activism, motherhood, “the abysmally poor maternal health outcomes of Black women in the US,” and more. Hunt, a gifted storyteller, has a strong voice all her own, and she explores a host of current concerns, including Black grief and “what happens when the Internet and social media do the eulogizing.” She considers the Black church’s “fraught history with women” through the lens of singer Aretha Franklin’s public funeral. Amid the “angst and chaos,” Hunt hopes readers also see Black women as people who are “loving…growing, and finding the meaning in life as we go.” And we do see their fullness in this collage of insightful analyses of the messy places where race, culture, and technology intersect.
A powerful collection that is very much of the present moment of resistance but will also endure.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-298764-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
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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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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IndieBound Bestseller
by Steve Martin illustrated by Harry Bliss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 17, 2020
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
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IndieBound Bestseller
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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by Steve Martin ; illustrated by Harry Bliss
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by Steve Martin
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by Steve Martin & illustrated by C.F. Payne
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