by Ree Drummond ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2011
A sometimes enjoyable love story hampered by treacly prose and syrupy sentiment.
Bestselling cookbook author Drummond (The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl, 2009) tells the tale of falling in love with an Oklahoma cowboy.
When she was in her mid-20s, the author left California, and a four-year relationship, seeking a new life in Chicago, with a quick stop on the way at her childhood home in Oklahoma. There her plans changed considerably, as she met a drop-dead gorgeous, steely cowboy who became known as Marlboro Man. She fell hard, enamored with his smoky voice, blue eyes and disarming chuckle, which “could quiet stormy waters. Bring about world peace.” Marlboro Man also turned out to be an admirable guy—grounded, hardworking, chivalrous, honest and open. Drummond, too, is a sweet character, who has written this love song from what feel like fleshed-out blog notes: fresh, intimate, minute and unselfconscious. The author’s gushing prose often becomes cloying and soporific—“I was in a black hole, a vortex of romance…I was floating on vapors. One kiss, and I was transported”—but she tempers it with cringingly hilarious descriptions of her sweat-drenched panic episodes when she first met his family and again at her wedding, and she writes artfully of the tall grass prairie and other natural wonders on the plains. The gloom cast by her parents’ marital breakup could have served as a counterpoint to her bliss, but Drummond lets it slip away by never fully exploring their circumstances.
A sometimes enjoyable love story hampered by treacly prose and syrupy sentiment.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-199716-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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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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