Up-and-down humor that sometimes gets to the heart of the realities of being black in America.
A black female comedian lays it all out there.
Stand-up comic and co-star of the WNYC podcast 2 Dope Girls, Robinson has a lot to complain about, starting with the need people have to touch her hair. In case readers fail to pick up on her humorous vibes regarding hair, the author includes a second chapter on the history of black hair in film, TV, and other media. Throughout the book—a hybrid of humor, truth-telling, and poking-fun-at-life-in-general—Robinson delves into what it means to be a woman and black and, more importantly, a black woman in today’s American society. Filled with references to pop culture and plenty of hashtags, the narrative addresses issues like how to avoid being the one black friend in a group of white people, the difficulty of being hired to play a role in a show because you’re either too black or too light, and why NFL players need to treat women better. She gives readers her list of nine guilty pleasures (No. 1: “Ranking Members of U2 in the Order of Whom I Want to Sleep With”; The Edge is first) and a list of demands for a future female president, including penalizing those who perpetuate the thigh-gap obsession. She also explains why “Lisa Bonet is Bae. Queen. Jesus” and waxes poetic on why she takes her laundry home to her parents’ house. “If a person were to play [the dryer] in a movie—don’t ask me why—it would be played by Meryl Streep,” she writes. “The dryer is that damn good.” Although the humor is forced and tiresome in places, Robinson does hit the mark on some important issues, and fans of her podcast will enjoy the book.
Up-and-down humor that sometimes gets to the heart of the realities of being black in America.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-14-312920-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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