A witty, eye-opening collection.
A New York City–based advertising executive candidly reflects on the tastes, habits, and lifestyles of his superrich Upper East Side acquaintances and their friends.
New York has always been a city known for socioeconomic extremes. However, as Kirshenbaum (Madboy: Beyond Mad Men: Tales from the Mad, Mad World of Advertising, 2011, etc.) suggests in this series of revealing essays, it has now become a place where the influence of the richest .01 percent “has spawned an era of excess, entitlement, grandiosity, and outright glitz not seen since the Roaring Twenties.” The author begins by examining the dynamics within overprivileged families, where fathers serve as little more than “invisible ATM[s],” parents often find themselves “smoking, popping and snorting” every drug imaginable, and nannies and chauffeurs double as surrogate parents for their employers’ delinquent children. Divorce is practically nonexistent, but for economic rather than emotional reasons. As one of Kirshenbaum’s informants observes, the only people who gain from marriage breakups are lawyers, who are nothing more than “undertakers for the living.” Dating among those who do divorce—and in particular, women—is an exercise in settling for one of three things: “sex, money or a warm body.” Friendship is often equally as devoid of feeling as romantic relationships. Kirshenbaum shows how wealthy people often surround themselves with individuals who “provide companionship and offer courtlike flattery” in return for financial gifts and favors. Where personal appearance is concerned, physical perfection isn’t merely a quest: it’s a way of life. The humor in this book is as understated as it is successful and derives largely from the way Kirshenbaum reports what he sees and hears in the world of the superrich and refrains from judging. Instead, he lets his informants—e.g., the divorced, wealthy businessman who shaves his body hair for his lovers and likens it to giving “consumers what they want”—reveal their foibles and foolishness themselves.
A witty, eye-opening collection.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0732-0
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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
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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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