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
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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