by Kurt Vonnegut ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1981
Is this "collage" of Vonnegut's occasional writings "a very great book by an American genius" (as he declares in a pretty hilarious mock-preface)? Or is it—as he goes on to suggest—a "blivit" (i.e. "two pounds of shit in a one-pound bag")? Well, it's neither, of course, and both fans and non-fans will find the Vonnegut they love or hate here. Starting out with a good strong polemic against censorship, he moves along to a moderately interesting family history—written mostly by his Uncle John, but spiced with highly Vonnegutian asides (about his grandfather: "This Albert Lieber, whose emotional faithlessness to his children destroyed the mind of my mother, along with prescribed barbiturates and alcohol, was a rich man's son"). Then come some college memories, a half-parodied "self-interview" for The Paris Review, and tributes to friends: William F. Buckley, Jr. ("I would give a million dollars to look like that"), Joseph Heller (a review of Something Happened), Irwin Shaw, Bob and Ray. And so it goes—with somewhat decreasing coherence—as Vonnegut includes Some commencement addresses; bits about his wives and children; essays on Twain, Swift, and CÉline; favorite songs (C&W tunes by the Statler Brothers); the introduction to a 1976 edition of Slaughterhouse Five (re Dresden—"One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I'm in"). Plus—at his very worst—a sophomoric sf story ("The Big Space Fuck") and an even more sophomoric, campy musical version of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." Throughout, a few themes are repeated a lot—his freethinker beliefs, the need for extended families, the literary-academic world's phoniness—and there are one-liners and aphorisms galore. So, though Vonnegut is just about right in giving himself a "C" for this book overall (Cat 's Cradle gets A+), it's quintessential KV—wildly sentimental but hard and funny on the surface—and sure to please his fans while offering sporadic items of interest to others.
Pub Date: March 1, 1981
ISBN: 0385334265
Page Count: 341
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1981
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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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SEEN & HEARD
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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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