Refreshingly original reading.
An acquisitions editor and freelance writer tells the story of how she became the owner and landlady of a century-old New England tenement home.
In 2004, Warner bought a three-story house she called PennHenge in the gritty Federal Hill area of Providence, Rhode Island. She was in her mid-20s and feeling the “twinge of wanting in” to a real estate market she feared would one day be closed to her. Big, awkward, and decaying, from the street PennHenge looked like “a freakishly large tooth in a grinning mouth.” Yet Warner made the commitment to buy it anyway, convinced that she would be embarking on a “practical endeavor” that would double as her version “of a badass path less traveled.” Soon after moving in, she became painfully aware that PennHenge would need many repairs and upgrades that she could not afford. Determined to make her new living arrangement work, Warner rented out two of the three floors to a rotating cast of lively oddball characters who, like the author herself, were young and “straining to leave adolescence.” Her independence and feminist impulses pushed her to take responsibility for the house and tenant “messes large and small.” But after years of feeling overwhelmed, she learned to “cede control in order to preserve my mental state.” As Warner accepted her limitations and the cheerful chaos that defined her reality, she also realized that no matter how imperfect her home, she genuinely loved it as it was. Things in PennHenge may have been dirty, broken, or misaligned, but the author was still happy for what she had created in a world obsessed by illusions of perfect—and ultimately unsustainable—lifestyles. The book is not only a story of a young woman’s often hilarious (mis)adventures in homeownership; it is also a thoughtful meditation on how living spaces both reflect and shape the individuals who inhabit them.
Refreshingly original reading.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-936932-21-4
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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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