A mixed bag of contemporary cultural insight and cautionary introspection on the universal issue of student loan debt.
The author of I Can’t Date Jesus (2018) illuminates the “soul-crushing” financial hardships associated with the pursuit of higher education.
Throughout his life, Arceneaux has struggled to free himself from the quicksand of student loan debt, and he acknowledges the impact this debt has had on many aspects of his life. During his senior year of high school, against his mother’s wishes, Arceneaux set his heart on attending Howard University, a prestigious, historically black college and an attainable goal regardless of its tuition—at least according to a handsome college-fair representative with whom the author was smitten. Though realizing that initial loans and hard-won scholarships were not going to sustain his life and schooling in Washington, D.C., it wasn’t enough to persuade him to return to his hometown of Houston. Remaining at Howard, the author racked up skyrocketing debt and soon became familiar with “rude private debt companies that hound the living hell out of you.” As he writes, “the student loan industry is a barely regulated, predatory system, and with Donald Trump in the White House and those equally useless people in Congress, oversight of the industry is becoming nonexistent.” Throughout these essays, Arceneaux passionately and candidly displays his political and racial awareness alongside sharp opinions on popular culture, marijuana use, Instagram, and depression. At times, the author’s writing comes off as overindulgent and peevish, much more so than in his previous book. He’s at his strongest when honestly evaluating the merciless harassment of robocalls and debt collectors who called him (and his mother, who co-signed many of his loans) early mornings and late nights while he struggled to stay afloat with writing gigs, some of which went unpaid for months. Anyone who struggles with debt and lives in what Arceneaux calls the “United States of Wage Stagnation and Economic Inequality” will relate to his predicament.
A mixed bag of contemporary cultural insight and cautionary introspection on the universal issue of student loan debt.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2930-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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