by Martha Frankel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2008
Of modest interest as an admonition to the potentially wayward. But Richler’s book has a better payoff.
A competent though slight reminiscence of days of wine and flushes.
Those who have read Mordecai Richler’s novel Joshua Then and Now will be familiar with entertainment journalist Frankel’s father and his cronies, tough immigrants with names like Cha Cha, Broadway and Sammy B who aspired to get out of the Bronx projects and passed the time playing poker and pinochle. The Frankels did get out, moving across town to an apartment in Queens with a nice view of the 1964 World’s Fair site, then under construction. The game followed: men in one room playing poker, women in the other playing canasta. “I learned to read the Daily Racing Form,” writes Frankel. “I learned about daily doubles and exactas, started to recognize the jockeys from one week to the next, learned the name of the man who sold the tickets, the one who smiled at me and said, ‘Hope this one’s a big winner, honey,’ as he handed the tickets to my father.” Such is the vanity of human wishes; Frankel’s memoir turns up few winning moments, its title referring to the bupkes that pop brought down on the low-stakes circuit of backroom poker and OTB. Frankel doesn’t do much better, coached along by an ex-con cousin who is distinctly unimpressed by the list she carries that runs from a pair to a straight flush (“‘Because I can’t remember what comes between three-of-a-kind and four-of-a-kind,’ I whine”). Still, she holds her own, self-aware enough to know her strengths and weaknesses as a player and smart enough to impress fellow inmates at a writers’ workshop. At that, the book has a workshoppy feel, with a few feints at drama—Is she a gambling addict? Will she lose her shirt at Harrah’s?—and the requisite what-I-learned lesson: “I’m no longer out of control, fighting a dragon I could never slay.”
Of modest interest as an admonition to the potentially wayward. But Richler’s book has a better payoff.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-58542-558-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
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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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