A mixed bag, much like many essay collections from pop-culture figures.
Current events and women’s issues humorously tackled by a successful and prolific black woman comedian.
In her follow-up to You Can’t Touch My Hair, 2 Dope Queens star Robinson brings back the unique brand of humor that made her debut book a bestseller. Here, the author explores common issues for women such as the yo-yo ride on the weight roller coaster, her own battle to accept her body image (“every day, I struggle not only with rewiring my brain to not equate self-worth with how my body looks, but also with not letting men and clothing companies define my own gaze”), and the idea of whether she has on “standing jeans or sitting jeans,” the former of which she needs to undo in order to eat her meal. She writes about men’s penis sizes, issues with her mother, the accumulation of debt, how meeting celebrities has affected her, and “being a trash person in a trash world”—to be fair, though, “no one on this planet can completely rid themselves of their trash ways.” All of the essays are filled with hashtags, slang, unnecessary abbreviations, and constant references to current events and pop culture, so readers not familiar with the current trends may get lost from time to time. Although unquestionably a humor book—and much of it is quite funny—the author isn’t afraid to confront serious issues, including violence against blacks, women, and Muslims; the difficulty of being a woman sports fan; and how topics such as abortion rights are constantly under attack by the white men in power in this country. Throughout, it’s clear that Robinson has a specific brand of humor that won’t resonate with everyone. Readers who enjoy her podcast and loved her first book will find even more to appreciate here; others should look elsewhere for a good laugh.
A mixed bag, much like many essay collections from pop-culture figures.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-53414-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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