Formulaic thriller with a hip-hop soundtrack.
Sexy and ambitious nightclub deejay encounters both fame and danger when she partners with a shady Russian businessman.
A relationship is the last thing on “Ms. Bobbi” Hayes’s mind when she first picks up Mikhail Petrov after one of her gigs. A flamboyant club diva known for her inventive music mixes and barely-there ensembles, Bobbi sees men as playthings, useful only for satisfying her sexual needs. But Mikhail is different. Older, whiter and much richer than her previous conquests, he is her match in bed, and she cannot believe her luck when he reveals that he has just purchased the famous nightspot Babylon and wants her to work there. But first he whisks her off to Greece on his yacht, where they party their way across the Mediterranean, making stops to show off Bobbi’s deejay skills in exotic locales like Ibiza and St. Tropez. Mikhail’s extreme wealth attracts Bobbi, who walked away from her own privileged upbringing in Chicago to make it on her own, but it’s his drive to succeed at all costs that really impresses her, and allows her to get past some of his more controlling tendencies. She doesn’t love him, but he promises to make her a star, and back in Miami, he does just that. He turns Babylon into Bobbi’s showcase, but even as the crowds line up, something is amiss. She’s smart enough to realize that Mikhail’s business cannot be fully legitimate, but she has no idea how ruthless her mysterious Russian is until one of his previous paramours is found dead. Before it’s too late, she gets help from surly (but oh-so-fine) bouncer Q, who has even more secrets than Mikhail. With an appealingly unapologetic heroine, this second effort from onetime music-video dancer Smith (The Rolexx Club, July 2006) is good at capturing the seamy side of South Beach nightlife, but it suffers from underwritten supporting characters and a silly plot.
Formulaic thriller with a hip-hop soundtrack.Pub Date: March 14, 2007
ISBN: 0-446-69853-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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