by Mike Lubow ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 23, 2016
Overall, a satisfying collection of vignettes about family and career suitable not only for fans of the author’s previous...
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A random assortment of over 100 short texts that reflect on a life well-lived.
Lubow (Wild Notes, 2015, etc.) presents vignettes in haphazard fashion without attempting to organize them thematically or chronologically. Spanning several decades, many take place in the Chicago area and focus on his family life or his career in the field of advertising. Some of the more endearing moments involve his wife, Donna. In one of his longer pieces, “The second call,” Lubow demonstrates how the trait of persistence served him well, not only when first meeting Donna at college, but also as part of his eventual profession. The inclusion of “footnotes” following many pieces allows the author to reflect on events with the benefit of hindsight or to provide updates, perhaps most effectively in “Four refusals and a footnote,” where he recounts creative differences with the talent in the field and then unexpected resolutions. “Summertime,” easily one of the most touching sketches, imagines an encounter between the author, Donna, and their now-deceased parents, where all appear to be in the primes of their lives. Generally, Lubow is at his best when he allows himself room for vivid sensory descriptions, as in “Halloween, 1949,” which conveys the palpable excitement for all ages surrounding that particular celebration. Again, a footnote adds value; the author modestly explains that even though the physical elements of a story may have faded, “they’re here in rambling words that compel themselves to get written down and are not much, but better than nothing.” As is often the case with this type of format, not all pieces carry the same weight. For instance, the flattening of a squirrel evokes 11 different glimpses of accidents or near misses involving vehicles, humans, and animals. The final piece in this largely entertaining volume occurs in a London eatery in the early 1980s. Dining with his wife and two sons, Lubow feels a sharp sense of pride and then mentions that the bistro in question is no longer open. Tellingly, he writes: “But the past never closes.”
Overall, a satisfying collection of vignettes about family and career suitable not only for fans of the author’s previous works, but also for new readers.Pub Date: June 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5304-1652-3
Page Count: 132
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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