It’s no great revelation that “all of us could use a good laugh these days,” but this author delivers more than just one,...
A deliriously, levitatingly funny memoir.
Humor columnist Gilman (Kiss My Tiara, not reviewed) may have been girlie and ambitious as a kid, but she always had her subversive, countercultural New York City family to keep those sentiments in perspective. “Heresy had become a family tradition” in the Gilman household, where urban paganism possessed a natural buoyancy. From her parents—once they had pummeled her out of the “fugue of perpetual arousal” that resulted from her discovery of sex—the author acquired a love of life’s grotesque ironies, like learning that she had to pay to get in to Auschwitz. The thread of tough humor working its way through this memoir serves to backlight moments of exquisite realization (during puberty “your body starts changing subtly, like a shoreline”) and startling, genuine epiphanies: The week she spent visiting concentration camps, the author writes, showed her “how spoiled and ill-equipped I was to cope with the viciousness of the world.” She allows us to see how vulnerable and naïve a drama queen she can be, but then gets back to the yin and yang of it all, noting that “devoutly religious people made me irritable . . . their rectitude and moral certainty just made me want to act out even more.” Gilman is both pathetic and upbeat, sharp and capable of recognizing sharpness in others. At her first job, she spouts a little radical rhetoric and gets a zinger in return: “You know where workers of the world unite? The unemployment line.” In what may be the most disarming scene here, this modern anti-bride will fall in love with a full-blown, pouffy white wedding dress. Yes, she will say, there is so much that is ridiculous and passionate and deluded in life—go look in any mirror.
It’s no great revelation that “all of us could use a good laugh these days,” but this author delivers more than just one, and that makes her special.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-446-67949-6
Page Count: 365
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
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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