by Lynn Marie Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 3, 2005
Not refined, wise or gritty enough to touch all readers, but likely to be a hit with teenagers and 20-somethings.
A young memoirist recounts her descent into and triumph over addiction.
Smith arrived in New York City in 1997, fresh from high school in Danville, Pa. A natural on the stage, she came to the Big Apple to pursue her dreams of acting. But before she could be discovered, she discovered Ecstasy. The first pill she popped was a Mitsubishi, purchased from a dealer who looked like a J. Crew model and swallowed in the bathroom of McSwiggans Pub on Second Avenue. All of the sudden, the beer bottles glistened “like lights on a Christmas tree,” Smith’s skin turned to silk, and simply placing her palm on the top of the bar felt profound. She was hooked. Meanwhile, life in Manhattan rolled on. There were sublets to find, singing lessons to take, and kids to baby-sit. Smith fell head over heels for Mason, a Manhattanite home on winter break from a Vermont college. Then came the crash. She was plagued by panic attacks and nightmares about her father killing her family. Her period stopped; she occasionally flew into rages. Eventually, Smith got herself into rehab. She broke her addiction and quickly became an MTV-touted anti-drug spokeswoman. At the close here, she tells us that she’s been clean for four years, and now gets “high on life.” As that last cliché indicates, Smith’s writing is uneven. Her descriptions of how good the highs feel are riveting. One wishes, however, that her editor had axed the poems. (“One pill has dissolved / Chills surge through my core / Before it wears off / I swallow one more.”) And her rapturous prose about her love for Mason tends toward the sophomoric: “I knew he was my soul mate . . . .When I looked into his eyes, I felt like I had known him my whole life.”
Not refined, wise or gritty enough to touch all readers, but likely to be a hit with teenagers and 20-somethings.Pub Date: May 3, 2005
ISBN: 0-7434-9043-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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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