Overly sentimental, but Braxton fans will applaud the star’s candor and perseverance.
Six-time Grammy Award winner Braxton speaks out regarding her turbulent personal and professional lives.
From the time Braxton was a little girl growing up in rural Maryland, she wanted to be a star. By the mid-1990s, she had achieved that goal, and her 1996 single, “Un-break My Heart,” from her second album, “Secrets,” became a chart-topping, certified-platinum success. Yet guilt, financial and personal troubles, and ongoing family health issues have pockmarked the author’s projected glamorous life. In 1988, 21-year-old Braxton and her four sisters landed their first recording contract. “No one could’ve predicated the painful episode that would follow: Five bright-eyed Braxton sisters would soon be narrowed down to one.” For many years, Braxton suffered severe guilt about accepting a record deal that excluded her sisters, and the decision infuriated her mother, which added to Braxton’s sense of dismay. The author’s success was also marred by two bankruptcies, a divorce and her son’s autism diagnosis. The author faced her own health crisis during her Las Vegas show when she received a diagnosis of lupus. “My diagnosis that day marked the beginning of my road to recovery,” she writes, “but it was also the end of my Vegas run.” The author eventually disclosed her condition on the family reality TV show Braxton Family Values, which began in 2011 and features her mother and sisters. Braxton seems intent on establishing a secure pathway through life’s inherent messiness. “I’m starting to realize that we’re not supposed to keep everything lined up and in perfect order—even with our best efforts, we can’t accomplish that anyway,” she writes. “Instead, we’re meant to find lessons in both the chaos and the cleanup.”
Overly sentimental, but Braxton fans will applaud the star’s candor and perseverance.Pub Date: May 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-229328-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
An invigoratingly candid memoir from a giant of women’s rights.
A respected feminist activist’s memoir about the life lessons she learned as a peripatetic political organizer.
Until she was 10 years old, Steinem (Moving Beyond Words, 1993, etc.) grew up following two parents who could never seem to put down roots. Only after her stability-craving mother separated from her restlessly migratory father did she settle—for a brief time until college—into “the most conventional life” she would ever lead. After that, she began travels that would first take her to Europe and then later to India, where she began to awaken to the possibility that her father’s lonely way of traveling “wasn’t the only one.” Journeying could be a shared experience that could lead to breakthroughs in consciousness of the kind Steinem underwent after observing Indian villagers coming together in “talking circles” to discuss community issues. Once she returned to the United States, she went to New York City, where she became an itinerant freelance journalist. After observing the absence of female voices at the 1963 March on Washington, Steinem began gathering together black and white women to begin the conversation that would soon become a larger national fight for women’s rights. In the 1970s and beyond, Steinem went on the road to campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment and for female political candidates like 1984 vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro. Along the way, Steinem began work with Native American women activists who taught her about the interconnectedness of all living things and the importance of balance. From this, she learned to walk the middle path between a life on the road and one at home: for in the end, she writes, "[c]aring for a home is caring for one's self.” Illuminating and inspiring, this book presents a distinguished woman's exhilarating vision of what it means to live with openness, honesty, and a willingness to grow beyond the apparent confinement of seemingly irreconcilable polarities.
An invigoratingly candid memoir from a giant of women’s rights.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-679-45620-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
BOOK TO SCREEN
A vivid, gut-wrenching, beautifully written, memorable book.
With the assistance of New York Times Magazine writer Corbett, Lindhout, who was held hostage in Somalia for more than a year, chronicles her harrowing ordeal and how she found the moral strength to survive.
In 2008, Lindhout, after working as a cocktail waitress to earn travel money, was working as a freelance journalist. In an attempt to jump-start her fledgling career, she planned to spend 10 days in Mogadishu, a “chaotic, anarchic, staggeringly violent city.” She hoped to look beyond the “terror and strife [that] hogged the international headlines” and find “something more hopeful and humane running alongside it.” Although a novice journalist, she was an experienced, self-reliant backpacker who had traveled in Afghanistan and Pakistan. She hired a company to provide security for her and her companion, the Australian photographer Nigel Brennan, but they proved unequal to the task. Their car was waylaid by a gunman, and the group was taken captive and held for ransom. Her abductors demanded $2 million, a sum neither family could raise privately or from their governments. Negotiations played out over 15 months before an agreement for a much smaller sum was reached. The first months of their captivity, until they attempted an escape, were difficult but bearable. Subsequently, they were separated, chained, starved and beaten, and Lindhout was repeatedly raped. Survival was a minute-by-minute struggle not to succumb to despair and attempt suicide. A decision to dedicate her life to humanitarian work should she survive gave meaning to her suffering. As she learned about the lives of her abusers, she struggled to understand their brutality in the context of their ignorance and the violence they had experienced in their short lives. Her guards were young Muslim extremists, but their motive was financial. Theirs was a get-rich scheme that backfired. “Hostage taking is a business, a speculative one,” Lindhout writes, “fed by people like me—the wandering targets, the fish found out of water, the comparatively rich moving against a backdrop of poor.”
A vivid, gut-wrenching, beautifully written, memorable book.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4560-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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