Farsad combines throwaway laughs with some keeper insights. Readers may sense that she has a smarter, funnier book on the...
A memoir/essay collection from a self-described “hyphenated American…an Iranian-Muslim-female-honey-mustard-enthusiast” who is also a comedian, writer, filmmaker, and TED talker.
Such range and accomplishment suggest that Farsad might well have a rich and provocative book in her, but this scattershot debut isn’t it. Toward the end, Farsad describes her work as “social justice comedy,” though some of the most scathingly funny comedy today could fit that label without wearing it. Unlike plenty of books by stand-up comedians, this isn’t simply a series of bits or monologues transferred to the page. The author has some serious points to make about stereotypes and icons and about the many like her who are left in the margins amid “the binary discussion of race.” Her book takes its title from one of her TED talks, and it’s a title that would seem to suggest a black author—a symptom of the disease that afflicts the nation’s concept of diversity. Some of the most engaging sections are those that are closest to memoir, in which Farsad discusses growing up as a minority to other minorities, identifying with Mexicans because they were the closest match for the sole Iranian-American. “Just as I considered myself Mexican in high school,” she writes, “in college I began shifting my sights to being black.” The author came to realize that wherever she found herself fitting, she has also been marginalized by gender, by the assumption that a woman couldn’t be funny enough to be a comedian or smart enough to be a writer. Devoting herself to toppling such stereotypes, she finds strongest resistance to her work from those who, like her, are Muslim women. “My material isn’t racier than the average comic’s, not by a long shot,” she writes. “But to that Muslim minority, in the audience, it was shameful.”
Farsad combines throwaway laughs with some keeper insights. Readers may sense that she has a smarter, funnier book on the way later in her career.Pub Date: May 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4555-5822-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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
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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