A solid addition to the growing genre of short, witty essays written by women about having a career while trying to raise a...
Short takes on life from a writer and mother of small children.
Yearning for an ideal life, Barry (Later, at the Bar: A Novel in Stories, 2008) and her husband left New York City and good-paying jobs to buy a fixer-upper apartment building near the author’s hometown. Barry planned to write, and her husband planned to start a magazine. They would raise children, eat good food, visit with family and friends, and have a nice home with neighbors just across the hall. What they couldn’t foresee as they embarked on their dreams was the recession of 2008, which threw a corkscrew into their plans. Writing with honesty, a bit of humor and some self-despair, Barry delves into the highs and lows of being a work-at-home writer mom who struggles to balance hours spent writing a novel with the care of two small, rambunctious boys, the need for money and work at a time when no jobs were available, and the thousand other aspects that make up a normal life: trips to the coffee shop, fights with her husband and sister, maintaining a home, enjoying the holidays, etc. Her story reflects the angst felt by many women who try to juggle raising small children with having a career, whether that occupation entails leaving the home on a daily basis or working amid the chaos of a domestic household. The author also explores the overpowering joy one can feel at odd, brief moments when everything coalesces into beauty and love. Interspersed with a smattering of recipes, these short and pithy nuggets offer readers a glimpse into the fears and dreams of a modern woman who balanced work, marriage and kids to the best of her ability.
A solid addition to the growing genre of short, witty essays written by women about having a career while trying to raise a family.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9336-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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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