by Neal Pollack ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 10, 2010
Both sincere and subversive, Pollack will likely inspire more than one reader to commit to yoga.
Freelance journalist Pollack (Alternadad, 2007, etc.) seeks to reclaim his better self within the ridicule-friendly world of yoga.
Once upon a time, the author was a hot writer, a charmingly comedic iconoclast ever ready to poke a sharp stick in the eye of convention. The world at his doorstep, he did the “full retard,” making a narcissistic ass of himself, fueled by a steady intake of recreational intoxicants. His descent was meteoric. In a review of his novel Never Mind the Pollacks (2003), the New York Times Book Review wrote that Pollack had gone from incandescent satirist to an “ordinary humor dork, yet another doughy, 35-ish white man with a goatee and thinning hair.” When his agent stopped calling, the author decided to regroup and, at the suggestion of his wife, try yoga. However, yoga—or at least its wayward applications: “high-priced self-empowerment for the over-privileged creative class”—is just the kind of activity that Pollack used to demolish with satire. But something clicked. He hasn’t abandoned snark and cynicism—they are the lifeblood of this quest, along with a healthy dose of self-abasement—but at his unassuming local yoga place, he found that the practice “calmed his inner pervert.” His circumstantial rage was chilled as he sweat through the routines, but he’s still a yoga bad boy, a bong-hitting carnivore with a taste for laughter, which makes him a highly entertaining guide as he investigates the good, bad and ugly of the yoga spectrum, from yogathons to yoga competitions to freestyle yoga rap. There is also a lovely authenticity to his discovery of his yoga fundamentalism—“the words of ancients and a few sacred physical principles that humans have been practicing since the dawn of time.”
Both sincere and subversive, Pollack will likely inspire more than one reader to commit to yoga.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-172769-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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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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