A tone of whininess undermines the author’s sharp perceptions.
Chronicles of fame, mishaps, and assorted grievances.
In 1986, Janowitz (They Is Us, 2009, etc.) became “semi-famous,” she writes, with the publication of the story collection Slaves of New York, putting her in the company of the Literary Brat Pack along with Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis. “Here’s what we had in common,” she writes: “the fact that our books were not supposed to become big sellers and were never expected to get any attention, but actually did.” Janowitz continued to publish novels and stories, some made into films; she attended glitzy, star-filled parties and counted among her celebrity friends Joan Rivers (“warm, yet driven to achievement”), Lou Reed (“easy to talk to”), Andy Warhol, with whom she dined a few times a week, and Elizabeth Hardwick, her teacher at Barnard College. Janowitz’s frank, sometimes funny, often repetitious memoir imparts tart literary gossip but focuses mostly on her hardscrabble life: living in poverty with her mother after her parents divorced and, even as a successful writer, always worried about money. Homes included a “former meat locker” in Manhattan, a claustrophobic trailer with no running water, and a crumbling house in upstate New York, which she shared with a bunch of rowdy poodles. The author recounts her unstable, philandering father, a psychiatrist addicted to marijuana who sent her hate letters each time she visited; her sullen teenage daughter; and her mother, whom she moved from one nursing home to another as her dementia worsened and whose decrepit house she spent years cleaning out. After her mother died, her vindictive brother besieged her with angry emails threatening to charge her with embezzlement from their mother’s retirement funds. Fearful, irritating, and needy, the author tends to see the dark side of every experience. She glosses over posh travel assignments, for example, to detail an abortive effort to interview a belligerent hit man.
A tone of whininess undermines the author’s sharp perceptions.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-239132-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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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