by Padma Lakshmi ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 8, 2016
An intimate, revealing portrait, far different from the woman blazoned in the tabloids.
In an absorbing memoir, Lakshmi (Tangy Tart Hot and Sweet: A World of Recipes for Every Day, 2007, etc.), host of Top Chef, cookbook author, fashion columnist, and coveted supermodel, focuses more on love and many wrenching losses than on glamour and glitter.
Born in India, Lakshmi came to the United States when she was 4, flying alone to New York to join her mother. Although struggling financially, her mother, who reminded her that “beauty is not an accomplishment,” always managed to send the author back to India each summer, where she lived with her doting grandparents. Her family, their culture, and especially the food they shared (the book includes a few recipes) were crucial to her identity. Encouraged to work hard in school, she majored in theater arts at Clark University but had no clear career goals. She never thought she was particularly beautiful, and growing up in the U.S., she came to believe that “lighter skin is equivalent to a more attractive, worthier self.” Modeling happened by accident, during a stay in Europe, but once launched, Lakshmi found great success. In Europe, she embarked, also, on the first of several important relationships. The author realizes she always sought “a mentor, an older, wiser man” to make up for the absence of her own father, but it seems she was also attracted to wealth and power. Her European lover was urbane, cultivated, and rich. Later, she married Salman Rushdie, but they divorced after several rocky years. Lakshmi was intent on pursuing her TV career, while Rushdie expected her presence as he traveled the world as a literary star. Health issues also interfered: diagnosed with endometriosis, she required several surgeries during which Rushdie, self-absorbed, offered little support. Two men—a billionaire financier and philanthropist and a venture capitalist—came into her life later, one fathering her daughter.
An intimate, revealing portrait, far different from the woman blazoned in the tabloids.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-220261-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2016
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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