Largely forgettable.
New York City woman-about-town’s memoir about her life-as-performance-art quest to be fashionably “uncool.”
Inspired by her experiences as a Bloomingdale’s Christmas elf, art-school grad and downtown NYC scenester Rev Jen (Live Nude Elf, 2009) began carefully forming her uncool identity in the early ’90s by wearing Spock-like elf-ear attachments. Recalling her days as a young Lower East Side denizen in the mid-’90s, Jen describes her tame arty antics as grand, anarchic gestures of rebellion against the fusty establishment. She became known for her reactionary Anti-Slam poetry night, which fostered an environment of cuddly uncritical acceptance for wannabe slam-poets with a strict set of rules against any kind of harassment from the audience. Her promotion of art-damaged egalitarianism extended to her creation of an all-admission clique called the “Art Stars,” which turned out to be little more than an alcoholic support group for directionless art-scene dregs. In between her persistently meaningless nightlife activities, she drifted from one low-paying job to the next, drank a lot, had sex with men who treated her badly, and experimented with LSD, all while managing to pay rent on her LES apartment. Rev Jen is perpetually obsessed with what’s “cool” and what’s “uncool,” and her actions always end up blurring the line between the two. Although she styled herself as an outcast rebelling against the prevailing highbrow culture of the day, the author seemed ultimately reluctant to mix with truly unhip people: like, say, her schoolmates who listened to Phil Collins and the Republican rednecks who frightened her at a Charlie Daniels concert. Naturally, as she attained local celeb status for being a kitsch-loving contrarian, she finally got to frolic among extremely “cool” people: namely, transgressive filmmaker Nick Zedd and hyper-confessional author Jonathan Ames, among others.
Largely forgettable.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-3166-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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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