by Mika Brzezinski with Daniel Paisner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 5, 2010
An intriguing account sure to interest working women and news junkies alike.
The MSNBC personality writes about her roller-coaster career in TV news.
Since 2007, Brzezinski has gained notoriety as Joe Scarborough’s moderate sidekick on Morning Joe, but her defining moment as a journalist came, ironically, during June that year, when Paris Hilton was released from jail. Asked repeatedly to deliver that bit of infotainment as the lead headline, Brzezinski refused and promptly hopped off her anchor’s chair and shredded the story. How she reached the point of such gutsy on-air defiance is the main subject of her memoir. “My one abiding thought,” she writes, “was, Look, I’m forty years old, and I’ve been doing this a long time, and I can’t pretend that this is news…I thought, You know what? Fire me. Go ahead. Like I’m scared of that happening again. And underneath that thought was another: This feels good.” The youngest of three siblings, Brzezinski grew up in the charmed shadow of her famous parents, Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, and Emilie Benes Brzezinski, an accomplished sculptor. Though the author says that her familial role was often that of “keeping the conversation going,” an important early lesson she learned from her mother and grandmother was that she could accomplish anything. Her ambition set her on the road to a major anchoring job, finding the right husband and raising children. Along the way, when she rose to the top at CBS News only to be fired and end up unemployed for more than a year, Brzezinski says the lesson she has gleaned is “pace yourself.” While the author seeks to advise women on negotiating the charged family-career divide, the most memorable moments are those in which Brzezinski simply tells her story, displaying her struggles and achievements as a journalist, wife and mother.
An intriguing account sure to interest working women and news junkies alike.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60286-111-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Berkley Prime Crime
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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by Mika Brzezinski with Diane Smith
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 Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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SEEN & HEARD
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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