by Mark Singer ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 2005
Peregrinations of a curious, harmless sort that time has rendered largely irrelevant.
Eclectic, long-winded and occasionally diverting portraits by New Yorker staff writer Singer (Somewhere in America, 2004, etc.).
The quirkier the subject the better in this reporter’s book, although Singer is clearly not interested in his subjects per se but rather in what he unearths about them that will give him insider cachet. In the case of his tediously detailed study of the family-run vegetable farm in Del Mar, Calif., that supplies Wolfgang Puck’s Spago restaurant, Singer’s well-connected attentions win him an invitation from the owners to attend their matriarch’s funeral back in Japan. “Secrets of the Magus,” a rather cloying profile of famous sleight-of-hand artist Ricky Jay, merits reading for his in-the-know look at the craft and its historic practitioners. “Trump Solo,” written in 1997, ensures that the real-estate mogul comes off as a self-absorbed blowhard by nailing his “gaseous blather.” Singer likes Martin Scorsese a lot better, recording in “The Man Who Forgets Nothing” how “convincingly” the director repudiates his most graphically bloody depictions by declaring, “I’m not interested in violence that way anymore.” The most worthwhile pieces here are the portraits of less famous people involved in compelling pursuits, such as Richard Seiverling, organizer of the Tom Mix Festival, and international book collector Michael Zinman. “Mom Overboard!” offers 1996 cameos that now seem largely clichéd of overtaxed professional women on the mommy track. Occasionally, Singer’s recondite searches take him where few readers care to tread, as in “La Cabeza de Villa,” which recounts the Skull and Bones Society’s claim to have Pancho Villa’s skull in its Yale home. “Joe Mitchell’s Secret” delightfully treats a subject closer to home: deceased fellow New Yorker reporter Mitchell, author of Joe Gould’s Secret, whose “urban peregrinations . . . delineated a romantic quest, the trajectory of a polite but persistent intimate affection.”
Peregrinations of a curious, harmless sort that time has rendered largely irrelevant.Pub Date: July 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-19725-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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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