An absorbing and inspiring tale of dreams deferred but ultimately fulfilled.
A memoir encourages people of all ages to pursue their passions, artistic or otherwise.
Contino (As Life Goes On, 2015, etc.) organizes the text into 53 short chapters and begins with a turning point. As she enjoyed St. Thomas on her 40th birthday and reflected on her teaching career at the junior high level, she made the momentous decision to take her life in another direction and attend graduate school. The author then returns to her earlier years as a second-generation Italian-American growing up in the post–World War II era, where she felt that her options were limited. Heaven forbid that she become a writer! She wistfully paraphrases her community’s reaction to such an endeavor: “Good Italian women don’t write! What will the neighbors think? Vergogna! Shame!” Thus, she found other outlets for her creativity in the classroom and, more important, after school with colleagues who spearheaded the theater program. As she wryly comments: “I moaned, screamed, bitched, and cried over each production but loved every second I was involved.” Through her anecdotes from this period, Contino demonstrates the challenges and value of the dramatic arts as part of a child’s education. Subsequently, she began her doctoral program with eight weeks of study abroad, soaking up everything that London and West Yorkshire had to offer. The fact that she devotes 12 chapters to this short period shows its importance and represents a refreshing change of scenery, as the majority of the memoir takes place in New York City. It is a testament to her writing skills that readers may experience agita in view of the chaotic professional life, academic pursuits, and family obligations that dominate the chapters after her return. Indeed, she needed 17 years to complete her dissertation. There are countless humorous moments, such as the spectacle of an old fur coat slowly disintegrating onstage during her first post-England stint as a costume designer and her assertion that studying the works of Brecht and Beckett “was like eating Shredded Wheat without milk.” Regardless of this self-deprecating tone, Contino is proud of her achievements as educator, writer, and designer—and rightly so. Overall, this readable work carries a broad appeal, but it may particularly interest Italian-Americans, New Yorkers, Anglophiles, theater folks, and costume enthusiasts.
An absorbing and inspiring tale of dreams deferred but ultimately fulfilled.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 175
Publisher: LitFire Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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