An engaging and often hilarious memoir-in-essays from a pop-culture fiend.
Musings on our pop-culture pasts.
Blending memoir and pop criticism, Madison’s essays lace deeply intimate stories with lavish praise and punishing blows for icons of the ’80s and on. A critic, podcast host, and TV writer, Madison pulls few punches as he lures readers into a deep nostalgia. “The beauty of nostalgia,” he writes, “is that most people forget the things that they hated about something they love.” We remember a star or a show for a moment—a song or a scene that fixated us at the time, or simply because those were the people we told our friends we loved and so defined our lives. If this retrospective flattening offers us a more cohesive view of the past, then Madison is adept at re-creating the seamlessness with which media and real life can sometimes mesh. The memoir aspects of developing an understanding of his sexuality and self-image, parsing through family dynamics, and ricocheting between majority Black and majority white spaces in education are shot through with notes on Oprah, The O.C., Tom Cruise, the Power Rangers, and even Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars. Where the author pauses to pull apart the seams, he reveals an absurdity hidden beyond our memory. Madison’s ability to re-create the limelight, then cast withering shade, is insightful. Writing of Cruise—“a soulless cipher skilled at mimicking human emotion”—he describes the actor as “approximat[ing] human behavior in a way that makes you think he’s learning how humans interact with one another, not merely observing and deciphering it like most actors.” A brilliant critical voice for millennials, those on the cusp, or anyone who has had their eyes open over the past few decades, Madison proves a worthy successor to his own idol, Chuck Klosterman.
An engaging and often hilarious memoir-in-essays from a pop-culture fiend.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593446188
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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