by L. Valentine ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 19, 2018
A pleasantly quirky volume, sprinkled with humorous observations and attractive photos.
A New Zealand author offers a collection of photographs and verse.
Valentine makes her debut with this slim volume that showcases 15 of her color photos, each of which is overlaid with inspirational or motivational verse. For example, the author writes over a photo of a sculpture by the shoreline: “FREEDOM—To live, To explore & To be yourself. Be Open to the possibilities.” Each of the photo pages is followed by a brief piece revealing something about Valentine’s travels and adventures—vacation cruises, her time spent working in England, a couple of unfortunate liaisons. Readers learn that early on she built a career as a makeup artist in the movie and television industries, but discover nothing about her professional endeavors following that. Yet one poem toward the end gives a glimpse of her complicated ancestry: “Descendants of a royal Polynesian King / it’s my duty to learn of my privileged upbringing.” Valentine writes of her eclectic experiences with joyful abandon in this whimsical collection. Here she describes the two years she spent working in London: “I made heaps of money, travelled through Europe, and got to try cocaine—just a taste. I joined a vampire society group and wore gothic clothes, gained another tattoo.” The photos themselves are rather lovely scenic images that convey a sense of tranquility—primarily flowers, shorelines, and intriguing bits of architecture. While sharing only snippets of her life, the author nonetheless comes across as a happy rebel, endearingly self-deprecating even while exuding a sense of confidence: “As I see life, have no regrets. Play safe. Try everything at least once, within reason.” Some readers may find the text overlays a bit intrusive, making the photos appear more like greeting cards than works of art, and reminding them of the small volumes of photos and musings often found at bookstore checkout counters. Yet the overall effect is to create a moment of calm, a call to pause for reflection.
A pleasantly quirky volume, sprinkled with humorous observations and attractive photos.Pub Date: June 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5434-0799-0
Page Count: 36
Publisher: XlibrisAU
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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