Nothing that hasn’t been better told before.
British girl with wanderlust ends up stripping in New York, hating herself for it, blogging, getting book deal.
After receiving a degree with honors from Cambridge University and indulging in five years of world travel, Fowler decided to chuck it all and wound up as an exotic dancer in a Manhattan club. As related in her memoir, the career move wasn’t entirely voluntary. Arriving in New York with dreams of being a journalist, she was pushed into shedding her clothes for money by visa problems and a lack of job opportunities; she wasn’t exactly thrilled about her new line of work. Fowler refers to her drugged-up, champagne-buzzed, private dance-hustling self by her stripper name, Mimi. (The nickname was first given to her by a former boss, exasperated that all she ever talked about was herself). This tactic wears thin both as narrative tool and psychological armor. The author may insist that she’s “torn between being fascinated by my own destruction and disgusted by it,” but she’s wrong to assume that readers will be similarly fascinated by her purposeful self-annihilation and curious superiority complex. Based in part on the blog she wrote about her downward spiral, the book’s principal merit is that it refuses to indulge in the glossy propaganda that tries to sell stripping as somehow empowering; Fowler’s obscenity-laced tirades about her seedy environment refute that sentimental notion. But the author’s background as frustrated novelist shows clearly in her overwrought, overheated prose.
Nothing that hasn’t been better told before.Pub Date: June 23, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-670-01939-7
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
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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