by Tracy Tynan ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 2016
Star-studded, gossipy, and engaging.
The daughter of celebrities reflects on fame, parenthood, and style.
Costume designer Tynan makes her literary debut in a candid and entertaining memoir featuring her alcoholic, combative parents, theater critic Kenneth Tynan and novelist Elaine Dundy, and their assorted glamorous friends. Growing up in England and New York in the 1950s and ’60s, the author observed her parents engaged in constant “frenzied feverish activity” of parties, openings, and dinners. “I now realize,” she writes, “that my parents were the original celebrity hounds. They relentlessly and unabashedly pursued famous people.” They had little time for their only child, leaving her in the care of a changing cast of nannies. Besides their flaming fights, which resulted in broken pottery and drunken rages, the two openly had affairs. “When I was ten years old,” Tynan recalls laconically, “they decided theirs would be an open marriage. They deemed this the solution to their compulsive infidelity.” Her parents eventually divorced, and her mother spiraled into depression; her father, remarried, still pursued other women. Tynan looked at their behavior, including her father’s predilection for sadomasochism, “with a kind of voyeuristic fascination.” But her upbringing shaped her own relationship to alcohol, drugs, and men. For a while, she suffered from vaginismus, caused, she believes, by “a fear of sex” incited by her parents’ fights. Besides chronicling her erratic family, Tynan reveals her development as a fashionista and costume designer. At the age of 14, with her own clothing allowance, she followed her taste and instincts to hone a distinctive style. Each chapter focuses on some article of clothing (her first bra, sumptuous apple-green shoes) that evokes an episode of her life. “What was I going to wear?” becomes a familiar refrain as Tynan recounts social events and job interviews where she wanted to make a notable impression. Her vivid descriptions reflect her love of clothes, designers, fabrics, and, not least, shopping.
Star-studded, gossipy, and engaging.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2368-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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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