by Laura Fraser ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 7, 2001
A delightful fantasy, generously shared.
A freelance journalist’s wry, charming account of her intermittent affair with a romantic stranger.
Fraser (Losing It, 1997) opens her memoir with the phrase that transfixes her as she sits in an adult-ed Italian class: Mi hai spaccato il cuore (You have broken my heart). Her recovery from the collapse of her marriage (her husband of one year has dumped her for his high school sweetheart) begins with an impulsive trip to Ischia, in the south of Italy. Her spirits rebound amazingly when a fling with a Parisian art professor develops into a sequence of episodes in a variety of picturesque spots, including the Italian Alps, London, the Aeolian Islands, Marrakesh, and her hometown of San Francisco. The author paints each encounter in elegant and luxurious detail: The landscapes, hotel rooms, meals, scents, and sounds that she evokes in meticulous second-person prose get, and deserve, as much attention as her evolving relationship with the professor. Unsurprisingly, sensuous lovemaking, spectacular Mediterranean scenery, and sumptuous dinners gradually restore the author’s confidence and sense of well-being. Throughout an account that might easily have degenerated into self-indulgence, the writer’s voice remains remarkably brisk and clear-eyed, neither idealizing her occasional lover nor sentimentalizing her own emotional journey. If she has few startling insights to offer about heartbreak or healing, and if her solution is not easily imitated, the smart one-liners and unpretentious, witty asides that pepper the narrative are more than ample compensation. “You aren’t prepared for this,” she confides, recounting her first night with her lover. “You grew up being reminded that you should always wear nice clean underwear in case you have to go to the doctor suddenly, but no one ever said anything about wearing sexy ones in case you run into a French aesthetics professor on an island.” But with or without the right underwear, Fraser emerges triumphant and zestful.
A delightful fantasy, generously shared.Pub Date: June 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-42065-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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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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