Surprisingly dry, uninspiring rendering of a potentially intriguing life story.
“Godmother” of women’s erotica reflects on her young life as a self-styled political and sexual revolutionary.
Longtime sex educator, provocateur and journalist, Bright (Love and Lust: A Sex Journal, 2010, etc.) was born to an eccentric academic couple with an abiding professional and recreational interest in India and Indian culture. Early on, the author bounced back and forth between her mother and father’s care, from Los Angeles to Edmonton. Bright’s remembrances of her parents, who were bitterly divorced when she was two, aren’t especially vivid, and what she divulges about her mother is none-too-flattering. Most striking is the recollection of her mom’s failed attempt to drive their VW into a frozen Canadian river, a suicide attempt that would have also taken Bright's life. With such an unstable upbringing, it’s not surprising that the author turned to radical politics in high school and daily confrontation with pre–Equal Rights Amendment sexism from all sides. She went off to “commie” camp as a teenager and become editorially involved with The Red Tide, a leftist publication. After waltzing through college, she decided her interests were in gender and sexual politics, and she became the founding editor of the erotica magazine On Our Backs. Yet however heroic Bright’s sexual and political accomplishments may or may not be, one gets the sense that her middle-class activist antics stem more from superficial reaction rather than personal conviction. Throughout, the author’s self-congratulatory tone may prevent readers from fully embracing Bright’s worthy sexually and politically liberating accomplishments. For someone whose career and reputation rests so heavily on being a sex expert and erotica guru, she writes about her own fairly tame sexcapades with a coldly cerebral and often ironic detachment.
Surprisingly dry, uninspiring rendering of a potentially intriguing life story.Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-58005-264-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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