by Tim Grobaty ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 2016
A humorous love letter to a dying vocation.
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Grobaty’s (Growing Up in Long Beach, 2013, etc.) memoir chronicles a four-decade career as a Southern California newspaperman.
In 1976, the author, armed with only his brief experience on a community college newspaper, applied for employment with his hometown paper, the Long Beach Press-Telegram. Over the following decades, he worked his way up from copyboy to veteran journalist, holding a wide range of reporting and columnist positions. His book is a personal and professional memoir as well as a good-natured testament to the decline of print journalism: “We don’t buy ink by the barrel these days,” Grobaty writes, commenting on declining circulation. “We pick up a half-gallon on the way to work.” As a journeyman reporter, he observed the last days of highflying, hard-drinking, mid-20th-century newspaper culture. His establishment as a daily columnist coincided with the slow decline of the industry, and in middle age, he witnessed the capitulation of daily print media to the Internet. Eventually, Grobaty makes a sort of reluctant peace with the digital era, confident that his calling of columnist transcends the medium of print. At times, he ventures into the content of his columns—such as one on the relative danger of local fleabag highway motels—which meander away from the narrative arc; some chapters include reprints of entire columns. But for the author, there’s little separation between those columns and his life: “You write columns for a certain number of years and the daily snippets start to weave together as your sprawling memoirs.” For the reader, Grobaty’s quick, clever prose—honed over decades of deadlines—is a pleasure to follow wherever it leads. The loose biographical structure and distinct chapters allow readers to enjoy the volume straight through or as an anthology that one may pick up at different points. Overall, this book will make a pleasant Sunday read for anyone looking to return to the pre-blog joys of opening a freshly delivered morning paper, pouring a cup of coffee, and reading the musings of a favorite local columnist.
A humorous love letter to a dying vocation.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-941932-06-3
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Brown Paper Press
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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