An uneven introduction to an iconoclast whose voice will likely resonate with a specific generation.
A debut collection of essays by a BuzzFeed Canada senior writer.
Canadian journalist Koul writes about all manner of things, ranging from her family’s Indian culture to race and gender issues. Her essays are sporadically funny and often touching, but occasionally they feel insubstantial. The opening essay, “Inheritance Tax,” is a meditation on fear, family, and mutual protectiveness. “Size Me Up” is a David Sedaris–esque story about shopping. “If you are a woman reading this, you know this to be true: the possibility of getting stuck in a garment at a store where the employees have to cut you out of it is the beginning of the end of your life,” writes the author. “It’s like the saddest version of a C-section, where the baby is just a half-naked lady with no dignity.” The book is heavily weighted toward stories about Koul’s family—interstitial segments relay wry text messages between the author and her father—and her boyfriend, “Hamhock,” a “sweet, precious moron.” The author occasionally delves into more serious territory, writing about cultural racism in “Fair and Lovely” and delivering a biting essay on drinking and rape culture in “Hunting Season.” The focal point of the collection is “Mute,” an essay that relates the incident for which the author is most well-known, for better or worse. It details how serial Tweeter Koul managed to enrage the internet into Gamergate-level backlash by stating she would like to see more articles by nonwhite, nonmale writers, spurring rape and death threats. It’s a terrifying story, but Koul’s conclusions are less reflective than understandably defensive. “It’s no wonder I keep fighting with riff-raff on the internet,” she writes. “I’m expecting human interaction, and all they’re offering are beeps. I was dumb enough to want a hug from a machine.”
An uneven introduction to an iconoclast whose voice will likely resonate with a specific generation.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-12102-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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