Honest but undistinguished.
A former New York publicist's memoir, written as an “open letter” to an imaginary daughter, about the circumstances and personal choices that caused her to remain childless.
Grossinger grew up the only daughter of a widowed Polish-born woman with a mysterious past. When she was 7, her father’s first cousin and scion of the family that owned Grossinger’s, “the most famous Jewish resort hotel in America,” invited mother and daughter to live in the Catskills. Treated like the poor relations they were, Karla worked long hours as a hostess without complaint while the author “did whatever the Grossinger family told me” and never expressed the anger she felt at the treatment she and her mother received. The author still managed to mingle with celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor, Jerry Lewis and Jackie Robinson, who stayed at the hotel as performers or visitors. Precocious and intelligent, she began college at Brandeis at age 15 and then began work as a fundraiser for the City of Hope in Los Angeles. After a brief marriage that would leave her emotionally shattered for life, Grossinger went to New York City, where she opened her own PR agency and represented such luminaries as Betty Friedan and Elsa Maxwell. Later, she became a publicist for Playboy and the infamous Playboy Club, and after that, a successful travel writer. Despite her career triumphs, Grossinger never came to terms with her husband’s rejection of her and became a woman who “desperately feared commitment.” Eventually, she found long-term love, but it was with a married man who refused to “break up his home any more than it was already broken.” Grossinger does not regret the trajectory of her remarkable life, nor does she apologize for it, but the narrative is disappointingly pedestrian and offers only glimmers of poignancy.
Honest but undistinguished.Pub Date: July 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62087-615-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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