All in all, a great ride with a homegrown American original.
Television host Ellerbee roams around the world and through her memories, one meal at a time.
Ellerbee (Girl Reporter Blows Lid Off Town, 2000, etc.) is known in the industry as a straight-shooter, and the voice that got her fired from NBC is back with a vengeance in the third volume of her memoirs. Warm and brisk, utterly conversational, way beyond sassy, Ellerbee is afire to share the lessons she’s picked up and the dishes she’s consumed in her first 60 years of making an impact. During her Texas childhood, she was convinced that her mother’s fudge pie played a large part in her popularity. In a newly opened Vietnam, she conceived a passion for Pho, and in Bolivia (her first foreign tour—as a teenage missionary), she learned to love street food. There is no real discernible pattern to these extended meditations, although there are themes. Recollections of her very young folk-singing days are followed by an account of cruising on Malcolm Forbes’s yacht, that then followed by a piece about feeding the hungry in inner-city Baltimore. A revelation about the surprising comforts of cruise ships is placed next to her account of reporting from Afghanistan—post-Taliban, pre-stability. Ellerbee’s injustice radar still has a hair-trigger—targets include the wealth of the church in the poorest of nations, and any society that seeks to restrict women in any way. Many of her essays are about the difficulties of growing older. Though the pieces can be sharp and sappy by turns, sometimes in the same paragraph, Ellerbee’s charisma and immediacy operate like a tractor, drawing the reader smack into the heart of how it is to be a cancer survivor, to lose your parents, to be alone—or to raft down the Colorado, watch your children marry, or whip up a Frito Pie.
All in all, a great ride with a homegrown American original.Pub Date: May 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-399-15268-7
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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