by Stephen Fry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 9, 2015
If you’re a fan of Oscar Wilde, whom Fry has portrayed on stage and screen, then by near definition you’ll be a fan of this...
Fry brings his life story into the next decade in this pleasing follow-up to The Fry Chronicles (2012) and other books of memoir.
It’s not that he’s self-absorbed but rather that the author has packed plenty of lives into less than 60 years: intellectual and criminal, genius and addict, beset by countless maladies but always game to wander off onto mountaintop or into jungle in the service of adventure. Viewers of BBC America will now know him as the host of QI, fans of the Hobbit films will know him as a gold-crazed lakeside doge, and fans with longer memories will remember him from A Bit of Fry and Laurie (with House’s Hugh Laurie) and other confections—to all of which Fry adds that he’s a “representative of madness, Twitter, homosexuality, atheism, annoying ubiquity and whatever other kinds of activity you might choose to associate with me.” With so much to tell, it’s a touch disappointing that Fry drifts from coherent narrative to sometimes less-than-scintillating diary entries. There’s also perhaps a bit more about the agonies and ecstasies of cocaine than one might care to read (“As my prosperity rose my ability to acquire higher-quality cocaine increased commensurately….Better purity meant less diarrhea, nasal bleeding and nausea”)—though that was the late 1980s and early ’90s for you, a time of excess and abandon that today’s grim austerity makes all the more nostalgiaworthy. Fry, a gifted writer with a perfect sense of comic timing and anecdote-spinning, name-drops to beat Jim Harrison, but what a list of names he has to drop: from Emma Thompson to Alastair Cooke, P.G. Wodehouse, John Mills, Christopher Hitchens, and the Prince of Wales.
If you’re a fan of Oscar Wilde, whom Fry has portrayed on stage and screen, then by near definition you’ll be a fan of this writer and this book. Lots of fun—and readers who have been following all along will be wanting more, and soon.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1468311334
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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