by Kyria Abrahams ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2009
As oddly engrossing as repeated slow-motion viewings of an accident in an amusement park.
Replete with all the angst and adolescent passion requisite in a coming-of-age memoir, stand-up comedian Abrahams’s debut features a special grabber—the expectation of the impending end of days.
The author was reared as a Jehovah’s Witness, convinced that the world as we know it would soon end. The word from the Kingdom Halls where Witnesses gathered was that nonbelievers would perish any minute now in a fiery apocalypse, the Great War of Armageddon. Therefore, the author knew that worldly things like birthday celebrations, divorces, Smurfs, Halloween, yard sales and sex with strangers must be avoided in favor of regular Bible study and knocking on sinners’ doors. Sister Kyria learned that “Jesus was the head over man; man was the head over woman; and woman was the head over cooking peach cobbler and shutting up.” Somehow she became interested in matters not covered in Watchtower, Awake! or meetings at the Pawtucket Kingdom Hall. These included e-mail flirtations, weed, vodka and, in particular, sex. Her co-religionists soon became convinced that Abrahams, once tagged as gifted, had been taken by a demon spirit. Readers will be convinced it was the spirit of a comic performer, doubtless acquired at her early Theocratic Ministry School appearances as well as later competitive poetry slams. She was, naturally, “disfellowshipped” and thus deprived of perpetual life. Undoubtedly the cleverest lapsed Jehovah’s Witness yet, Abrahams offers a graphic, mordant, wickedly distaff take on the first two decades of her current life. It’s a confessional talking cure, melancholy as well as funny as it chronicles unharmonious family life, a short miserable marriage, foul boyfriends, booze and pervasive naïveté.
As oddly engrossing as repeated slow-motion viewings of an accident in an amusement park.Pub Date: March 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5684-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
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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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