by Rob Delaney ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 5, 2013
Candid and conversational, this memoir shows there’s more to Delaney than pithy tweets.
A comedian best known for his lively Twitter feed chronicles his rocky path to sobriety.
Although the aphorism “We laugh to keep from crying” risks sounding clichéd, Delaney proves the point in this alternately melancholy and madcap depiction of an adolescence and early adulthood fueled by booze (“I sought booze with a fervor measurably more intense than that with which I sought to get into young women’s underpants”). From a relatively happy childhood spent exploding eggs in the microwave and worshiping the metal band Danzig, the author progressed to drinking to the point of blackout, often engaging in self-destructive behavior that alarmed his friends and provided him with ample fodder for scatological jokes. (Delaney makes no bones about the fact that he regularly wet his bed while drunk up to the age of 25.) Ultimately, a car accident that led to jail, rehab and a stint at a halfway house helped him kick the habit. Delaney peppers his often harrowing accounts of alcoholism (“I was a disastrous, dangerous, ridiculous alcoholic piece of shit”) with tales of embarrassing sexual encounters, hijinks while traveling in Europe and an ugly bout of hepatitis A that afflicted the writing staff of the MTV show Ridiculousness. Squeamish readers may be put off by Delaney’s almost-rapturous descriptions of bodily functions, but those who hang in there will be rewarded with a surprisingly moving story of how humor can alleviate sorrow, if never completely eradicate it. The chapter about visiting the abandoned Danvers State Hospital—infamous for carrying out countless lobotomies in the 20th century—is worth reading on its own for the empathy it evokes for the casualties of early mental health treatment.
Candid and conversational, this memoir shows there’s more to Delaney than pithy tweets.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9308-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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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 Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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