by Mo Marshall ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 17, 2018
A worthy, readable account of one woman’s working and hustling in a half-dozen professions.
A writer combines a memoir with a business motivational guide.
The latest book from Marshall (Solitary Genius, 2011) begins on a personal note. Having graduated from Loyola with a degree in speech pathology, the author was living with friends in Baltimore and feeling at loose ends, seeking a change in her routine. In 1998, she worked up her courage to phone her mother’s cousin Phyllis, a successful casting director in New York City. Phyllis initially advised her to send out a wave of resumes. When that turned up nothing, Phyllis offered Marshall an internship in her casting business. The author moved to New York City and quickly began to learn the talent agency business, then switched to the antiques world, waitressing, and other jobs. From this varied and unpredictable employment history, she derives a series of lessons for her readers. These tips span the spectrum, from the personal (“When someone important in your life is ill with a disease, your day-to-day is simply not that important. They are”) to the philosophical (“Never underestimate the power of a good attitude”) to the professional (“SUCCESS IN ANY JOB REQUIRES ANTICIPATION AND THINKING FIVE STEPS AHEAD”). Marshall stresses that at every stage of her intriguing trajectory in New York City, she was surrounded by smarter people who didn’t get the jobs she did. It was her attitude that helped her to succeed where they failed. The earnestness of these sentiments is effectively conveyed in this wide-ranging work, although readers will notice that the author’s own story sometimes undercuts those ideas. Marshall was simply given her first break; she was able to move to New York because her brother let her stay on his couch; in between jobs, she lived with Phyllis in Larchmont—all advantages that most New York newcomers won’t have. But the author’s clear, general-purpose advice is eminently useful regardless of how she came by it.
A worthy, readable account of one woman’s working and hustling in a half-dozen professions.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-982211-69-1
Page Count: 110
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2019
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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