A deeply revealing memoir in which the pathos doesn’t kill the humor—delivers more than it promises.
In the follow-up to There’s Nothing in This Book that I Meant To Say (2007), comedian Poundstone chronicles her amusing and surprisingly personal search for the key to happiness.
In the introduction, the author notes that she has done things in the moment that made her happy, but she had never given much thought to pursuing it consistently. If anyone had found a secret to success, it would be cruel of them to keep it secret. So Poundstone resolved to find it and began an “unscientific” study to figure out if the secret could be found in various tasks or pursuits. Some of the experiments included an exercise regimen, dancing, spending more time with her dog and many cats, and hugging everyone she meets. She also spent an entire day watching movies with her kids, an enterprise that almost broke down over movie choices. After renting a Lamborghini, she discovered that while it thrilled her to drive a powerful machine, she felt like a jerk every time she passed a homeless person. That experiment was supposed to last for a week, but as Poundstone notes, she was deep in debt and could only afford to rent the car for a day. The concept of a comedian doing a series of stunts to find happiness seems like a pure romp, and there are plenty of great laughs, but that’s not the whole story. One of the reasons the author is searching for happiness is to cope with real struggles. She is raising three kids while trying to keep a tour schedule to pay her debts; her cats are involved in a territorial pissing fight; a good friend is dying of cancer. Eventually she realized the true nature of her search: “Happiness needs to be like a soaking rain, an aquifer, a tucked-away capacity to store enough so that when your friend Martha gets sick, you don’t fade away forever.”
A deeply revealing memoir in which the pathos doesn’t kill the humor—delivers more than it promises.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61620-416-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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