A blithe, entertaining collection that will surely delight Binchy’s many fans.
Newspaper pieces by a prolific novelist and playwright.
Binchy (Chestnut Street, 2014, etc.) began her writing career as a journalist for the Irish Times, starting out as women’s editor, from 1968 to 1973, and continuing as columnist, feature writer and reporter based in the newspaper’s London office; in 1988, she resigned a full-time position but contributed regularly until her death in 2012. This selection of her work represents Binchy’s eclectic interests, infectious sense of humor and wry take on social change. In early pieces, she reflected on her experiences as a waitress and choosing underwear in Australia. She didn’t much like her body (she was always overweight) and compared herself to those more slender and well dressed. In 1976, she tried a week of self-improvement, following suggestions in a women’s magazine, but failed to transform herself into one of the “new brand of unreal woman.” Nevertheless, she was a successful writer, and she also gleefully reported on the doings of the royals. In 1973, she was at Westminster Abbey (“lit up like an operating theatre”) for the wedding of Princess Anne to Mark Phillips, where Grace Kelly was among the guests, “staring into space, looking like she always looked, kind of immaculate.” In 1981, her subjects were the fairy-tale couple, Charles and Diana. Binchy was not surprised when they separated in 1987: “[T]here were always aspects of the royal romance that spelled danger from the word go.” She noticed that Sarah Ferguson, “a bit pudgy for a princess,” was on a strict diet. Unable to attend, she watched Kate and William’s wedding on TV: “I miss the magic of the English losing all their reserve,” she noted ruefully. A bit intimidated by Samuel Beckett, she nevertheless produced an insightful portrait of her compatriot, with his “spikey hair” and “ludicrous energy.”
A blithe, entertaining collection that will surely delight Binchy’s many fans.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-35345-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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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