A smart, entertaining and woefully funny take on being female and single.
Spectator columnist Kite turns some of her most wince-worthy experiences as a single woman into a humorous memoir, previously published in the U.K. as Real Life.
The author’s sometimes-rueful, sometimes-biting tone thwarts despair by turning every disaster into hilarious high drama. The book begins with Kite cancelling her wedding, underscoring how hard it is to find Mr. Right. She felt bad, of course, but she channeled her energy into the absurdities of dealing with “wedding-business” people who don’t believe in the phrase, “the wedding is off.” Even though her life was “in ruins,” the wedding gown vendor still wondered if she wanted to choose a different dress, as if that would change her mind. Working up to laugh-out-loud material, Kite writes of her “odd-job man” disappointments, including Tony, “a big, bearded man in his sixties,” possibly “the world’s most intellectual plumber” but clearly not the best man for the job, as he caused an “explosion of water” in her kitchen while repairing the boiler. Her dating life has been just as messy. A romance with a man who buys everything in groups of nine went sour when he insisted she line up her shoes just so. After more dating fiascoes, Kite sought help from a “relationship therapist” who charged £150 an hour and gave her leaflets with positive affirmations. Eager to have children but with no man in sight, the author investigated adoption, meeting a social worker who dashed her hopes with a series of Catch-22 questions. Readers might lose patience with Kite, a successful, well-educated, admittedly high-maintenance woman who has an exciting career in journalism and posh friends but is unable to manage her life, if she weren’t such a good writer and keen observer of human foibles, particularly her own. Even if we feel ambivalent about some of her choices, we can’t help but cheer her on.
A smart, entertaining and woefully funny take on being female and single.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1250055149
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin’s Griffin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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
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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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