Entertaining fluff.
Just when you’d think memoirs couldn’t get more self-parodying, a first-time author spills all about her obsession with psychics.
Lassez, a sometimes-employed actress in L.A., turns to psychics to determine if she’ll ever land a big role, or a man. Though these seers are only occasionally accurate, and then only about the most obvious things, she gets hooked. Her self-styled “addiction” is really just a conceit that allows her to ramble on about life as a broke, 30-year-old singleton in Hollywood. She could have transformed the one-dimensional palaver into something a bit more substantial had she been willing to offer even a little self-scrutiny. In passing, Lassez mentions an Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder diagnosis and scoring some free Zoloft from the wife of a doctor, but the closest she ever comes to examining her fixation with tarot is wondering, “When would I land the role of ‘Sarah Lassez,’ a woman with a life?” Fortunately, the silly subject matter is redeemed by the author’s self-deprecating sensibility and deadpan humor. Lassez’s ruminations about an engagement ring that is never offered, her description of a week spent rehabbing at her parents’ ranch and her transcription of the one lone therapy session she attends are hilarious. She manages never to take herself too seriously—an important quality in a narrator who is constantly kvetching about being dumped. When told by her shrink to join a 12-step group, Lassez admits that she’s looked into it already, but there is no Psychics Anonymous: “If I was lucky enough to be addicted to heroin I’d be at a meeting right now.” Further bolstering the book’s oddball charm is a likable cast of supporting characters. Readers may turn the last page wishing they could hang out with Lassez’s best friend Gina, who deserves an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in Creative Nonfiction.
Entertaining fluff.Pub Date: July 11, 2006
ISBN: 1-4169-1838-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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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