An odd, uneven mix of history, cultural criticism, and memoir.
Assorted musings from a modern witch.
Witches are having a moment, and Grossman has played no small role in making this happen. A practicing witch herself, she is the founder of the Occult Humanities Conference at NYU, and she has been published in a variety of publications. Her personal Instagram account has 8,000 followers, and the account for her podcast, The Witch Wave, has nearly 14,000. One might expect her book to be an accessible guide to witchcraft and its most recent renaissance. It is not that, and, indeed, it’s difficult to say what this book is or for whom it was written. The chapter called “Body Monsters” includes some intriguing observations about women and motherhood. However, in trying to establish a connection between historic and modern ideas about female sexuality and reproductive rights, Grossman includes much more detail about contemporary politics than is necessary to make her point. The extended exploration of witch-inspired fashion also feels like a bad fit for this section. The author’s treatment of witches in recent pop culture is especially frustrating. It reads as if Grossman is unaware of the incredible wealth of material—from the scholarly essays to fan sites—devoted to subjects like Sabrina Spellman and Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Willow Rosenberg. An author writing for a general audience can be forgiven for not taking a deep dive into the academic literature, but Grossman doesn’t offer any insight into these characters that wouldn’t be obvious to a casual viewer. Overall, the text feels more like notes toward a full-length study than a finished product, and the long passages of autobiographical material reinforce this sense. Most readers will come away from the book with an understanding of why it is so appealing to Grossman but little else.
An odd, uneven mix of history, cultural criticism, and memoir.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982100-70-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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