by Mara Wilson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 13, 2016
A readably candid, sharp memoir.
A 20-something playwright and actor’s memoir about her childhood journey to Hollywood fame and teenage descent into contented semiobscurity.
Wilson began acting at age 5. After pestering her mother to let her do commercials like her older brother, she was soon called to audition for a part in the Robin Williams vehicle Mrs. Doubtfire. Her role in that film led to appearances on TV shows like Melrose Place and in movies like Miracle on 34th Street and Matilda, a film with which she would become permanently identified. Yet from an early age, Wilson realized that her cuteness, compared to Shirley Temple’s audience-pleasing good looks, could render her susceptible to the kind of studio control that Temple had faced. “Everyone in the world [would know] a version of Mara Wilson that wasn’t me at all,” she writes. By the time she was a teenager, the looks that had brought her early fame could not compete with those of other young actresses like Kristen Stewart and Scarlett Johansson. Refusing to use cosmetic surgery to try to save a career she questioned, Wilson began to focus more on dealing with who she was: a girl with deep fears and compulsions that had emerged in childhood and had begun affecting her daily life and relationships. Despite her disenchantment with Hollywood, she retained a love of performing, which she continued to do as a student at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and which she eventually merged with another childhood love: storytelling. Immersing herself in a community that included other storytellers, stand-up comedians, and burlesque show performers who showed her the power and joy in “liv[ing] your fear,” the author at last found herself, “her people,” and her creative stride. This funny, at times painful, but always honest book tells a coming-of-age story that is not only entertaining, but also wise. Learning the lessons of self-acceptance and finding strength in vulnerability is often the best success of all.
A readably candid, sharp memoir.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-14-312822-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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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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