Bold, well-crafted essays on living, loving, and striving while black.
Courage and outrage inform 13 essays about black womanhood.
Novelist, memoirist, and essayist McLarin (Writing, Literature, and Publishing/Emerson Col..; Divorce Dog: Men, Motherhood and Midlife, 2015, etc.) gathers forthright essays reflecting on love, friendship, motherhood, and, above all, overt and “thinly-veiled” expressions of racism. At 15, McLarin left home to attend Phillips Exeter Academy, where she felt a growing anger at “an omnipresent cultural representation of Blackness as ugliness” and at an elite white community that deemed her an outsider. “This place, this world, these people do not mean for you to live,” she believed. “You can go along and die. Or you can get pissed.” Her anger “was safe and energizing and life-saving” but also isolating. Anger abated a bit at Duke only to surface again when she began to work as a journalist, where “resentful white reporters” whispered that she had gotten her job only because she was black and where she covered the effects of poverty, prejudice, and injustice. “I’ve been labeled angry, aloof, and even uppity,” she writes, by people who could not “understand the origins of such projections.” McLarin praises the Obamas for their “calm, centered, not-taking-it-personally response” to the endemic racism that “is as American as apple pie.” Not as serene, after being “mistreated, disrespected, or generally screwed-over or wronged” 359 times (a “guesstimate”) in her life, she twice resorted to revenge. And beginning when she was 17, she suffered recurrences of debilitating depression, a malady she had thought affected only whites: “Mental illness, mental disorder of any possible stripe, was definitely white folks’ mess.” In her candid title essay, she considers her transition from girlhood to womanhood, the female body, and her experiences of midlife online dating, where misogyny was apparent—misogyny, like racism, rooted in fear. “What white America fears,” she writes, “is not Black people but the loss of white identity, privilege and position the Black presence demands and also the spiritual and culture power Black survival has produced.”
Bold, well-crafted essays on living, loving, and striving while black.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63246-079-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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