Irby’s vocabulary is akin to that used in late-night comedy clubs. Those faint of heart beware. If you are ready for strong,...
A raunchy, funny and vivid collection of essays chronicling intimate acts and everyday life as perceived by Chicago blogger and performer Irby.
No topic escapes the author’s blunt analysis, whether it pertains to herself or others. The author opines on how other people have sex, her relationship with her gynecologist, her ongoing and graphically depicted battle with Crohn’s disease, the embarrassment of sucking her thumb or the overall icky behavior of men. As a black child growing up on Chicago’s North Shore, Irby experienced a life sandwiched between white and black cultures. “I am pretty much an expert in white people,” she writes. “I don’t really understand lacrosse, but I do pay for a subscription to the New Yorker.” Irby sniffs out and confronts the racial ticks both races engage in—e.g., “black people who are uncomfortable in their own skin…try to control and demean other black people by challenging their “blackness.’ ” Or whites burdened by guilt, engaging in racial profiling and taking her at face value: “I love that you have no idea that I don’t know what the fuck I am talking about. I’m not Cornel West, bitch.” Irby refuses to adhere to any boundaries in her selection of topics or language. The subject of sex runs throughout the collection. The titles of two of the essays give some indication of the author’s take on the topic: “How to get Your Disgusting Meat Carcass Ready for some New, Hot Sex” and “Massive Wet Asses.”
Irby’s vocabulary is akin to that used in late-night comedy clubs. Those faint of heart beware. If you are ready for strong, sarcastic language paired with attitude-laced humor, strap in and get ready for a roller-coaster ride to remember.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9884804-2-1
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Curbside Splendor
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
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
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