by Paul Solotaroff ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 26, 2010
A sobering, briskly told tale of bigorexia.
Men’s Journal and Rolling Stone contributor Solotaroff (Group: Six People in Search of a Life, 1999, etc.) delves into his personal struggles with self-perception and body image, the result of a disillusioned childhood and a string of failures in school and work.
The uproarious opening chapter is a bittersweet comedy of errors and epiphanies in which one misstep follows another as the author hits rock bottom eating food swiped from a bathroom sink and rummaging through the garbage for a steroid syringe. Solotaroff then goes back to 1975, when, at 6’1” and 140 pounds, “even my hair was depressed.” A college dropout at 20, barely subsisting in New York City and receiving little sympathy from his father, he returned to college and became captivated with classmate Mark, a former “stick-thin boy” turned hulking, “stunning male specimen.” Over an afternoon of euphoric, blood-pumped basic training with this campus chick magnet, Solotaroff became hooked, resulting in an experiment in narcissistic self-improvement gone haywire. Workout buddy Kenny introduced steroids, and three months in, Solotaroff gained 30 pounds of muscle and became “a butch burlesque of male pride.” The author, virtually unrecognizable to his parents, was lost in a swirl of calories, skin-tight clothes, nightclubs, cocaine, orgies and even happiness, albeit temporary. Training with Angel, a black bodybuilding playboy, gave Solotaroff access to more steroids, but being constantly “ravenous and speedy” burned him out on his life as a stripper and as a boyfriend to Kate. As sad as the author’s downward spiral becomes, his yearning for bodily transformation is captivating. With his body collapsing from the drug regimen, the regret becomes palpable as he reconsiders his vainglorious quest.
A sobering, briskly told tale of bigorexia.Pub Date: July 26, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-01101-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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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