Oprah-sanctioned relationship expert dishes on the decline of her own marriage.
Wolf (This Old Spouse: Tips and Tools for Keeping that Honeymoon Glow, 2007, etc.) may be a bestselling self-help author, frequent talk-show guest and marriage counselor to the stars. However, she’s also a woman who's been married and divorced four times, but is still grappling to stay in the ring. The author offers a disclaimer right from off the bat—the first line reads, "This is the story of a marriage counselor who couldn't keep her own marriage together." Wolf goes on to detail the ironies of being a woman well-known for her whiz-bang relationship tips simultaneously wiling away her time in a sexless, dead-end marriage. So begins an investigation of not only her own background, but those of her husbands and her parents as well. The author uncovers a number of painfully repressed childhood memories which afford the wisdom that most of her marriages were doomed to hurtle straight off a cliff from the get-go. Wolf turns to her patients for answers, mining their individual situations for comparisons to her own, and seeks solace while counseling them through their shared dysfunctions. Blending a conversational tone with tight, fast-paced prose, the author doesn't shy away from her flaws, resulting in a book that is touching, humorous and familiar.
Pub Date: May 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56947-936-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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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