An authentic and fresh extension of the author’s successful Web series.
Writer, producer and director Rae, famous for her popular Web series, "The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl," channels her humor and attention to detail into this eponymous collection of personal essays about all the embarrassing moments that have made her who she is.
Sharp and able to laugh at herself, the author writes as if she's unabashedly telling friends a stream of cringeworthy stories about her life. Having grown up with the understanding that laughing at and talking about people was a form of entertainment and bonding, Rae continues the tradition by inviting readers into her inner circle and making her own foibles her primary focus. Almost 30, she opens up about nearly everything in her life, from her lifelong fear of being watched while eating in public to acutely awkward experiences with Internet dating and cybersex. The theme that race plays in this book is integral, although Rae's approach, as with all of her subjects, is decidedly humorous and lighthearted; she veers, always, toward a personal tone as opposed to one that's political or polemical. Her unwavering candidness, the sheer energy of her voice and the fact that she clearly finds herself to be terrific material make her a charismatic, if occasionally exasperating, narrator worth rooting for. Having been in a committed relationship for seven years, Rae unpacks how her Senegalese parents’ union contributed to her attitude (indifference) toward marriage. Some readers will find her proclamations and direct confessions offensive and be turned off; others may be offended but laugh out loud anyway. In Rae, her audience has landed on a singular voice with the verve and vivacity of uncorked champagne.
An authentic and fresh extension of the author’s successful Web series.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1476749051
Page Count: 210
Publisher: 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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