Irby’s vocabulary is akin to that used in late-night comedy clubs. Those faint of heart beware. If you are ready for strong,...
A raunchy, funny and vivid collection of essays chronicling intimate acts and everyday life as perceived by Chicago blogger and performer Irby.
No topic escapes the author’s blunt analysis, whether it pertains to herself or others. The author opines on how other people have sex, her relationship with her gynecologist, her ongoing and graphically depicted battle with Crohn’s disease, the embarrassment of sucking her thumb or the overall icky behavior of men. As a black child growing up on Chicago’s North Shore, Irby experienced a life sandwiched between white and black cultures. “I am pretty much an expert in white people,” she writes. “I don’t really understand lacrosse, but I do pay for a subscription to the New Yorker.” Irby sniffs out and confronts the racial ticks both races engage in—e.g., “black people who are uncomfortable in their own skin…try to control and demean other black people by challenging their “blackness.’ ” Or whites burdened by guilt, engaging in racial profiling and taking her at face value: “I love that you have no idea that I don’t know what the fuck I am talking about. I’m not Cornel West, bitch.” Irby refuses to adhere to any boundaries in her selection of topics or language. The subject of sex runs throughout the collection. The titles of two of the essays give some indication of the author’s take on the topic: “How to get Your Disgusting Meat Carcass Ready for some New, Hot Sex” and “Massive Wet Asses.”
Irby’s vocabulary is akin to that used in late-night comedy clubs. Those faint of heart beware. If you are ready for strong, sarcastic language paired with attitude-laced humor, strap in and get ready for a roller-coaster ride to remember.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9884804-2-1
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Curbside Splendor
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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