More proof that funny e-mails and a good blog do not necessarily add up to a good book.
Former Family Circle marketing director McCorkindale writes about adapting to life on a Virginia cattle farm.
Burnt out from her demanding job and frightened by 9/11, the debut author gave in to her husband’s dream of leaving suburban New Jersey for the pastoral paradise of Upperville, Va. She kissed goodbye the high-six-figure salary that had her “dripping in Donna Karan,” packed her six- and 13-year-old sons in the Durango, and accompanied her spouse South to raise chickens. McCorkindale christened their 1890 farmhouse “Nate’s Place” because her literary husband, nicknamed “Hemingway,” noted its resemblance to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s home. The fish-out-of-water story is divided into short chapters that read as self-contained anecdotes, each including a fluffy e-mail, a set of tips or a top-ten list at the end. (The most worthwhile is “The Impractical Girl’s Guide to Farm Speak.”) The author’s rural misadventures included rollerblading through a cattle guard, rescuing Hemingway from a toppled chicken perch, running from a stampede of cows, schvitzing in the double Burberry turtlenecks she donned in emulation of the locals (she drew the line at riding pants), and chasing loose hens in Via Spiga stilettos (two in a lengthy parade of designer shoes). But frustrations such as cheerless DMV workers, slow bank tellers and unreliable contractors, McCorkindale might be disappointed to know, are not unique to the countryside. The author is at her funniest when recounting her faux pas: assuming that “riding” meant the subway, or not knowing what address to give the 911 operator (numberless estate name or P.O. box?). Her prose is chatty and upbeat, conveying an odd mix of self-effacement and snobbishness. (Continual references to her pre-move success and fashion-police smackdowns will alienate some readers.) The book’s 227 footnotes range from shout-outs to loved ones to entirely separate stories, most of which are distracting and should have been cut.
More proof that funny e-mails and a good blog do not necessarily add up to a good book.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-451-22493-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
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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