No bling-bling, no flava.
Tiresome, simple-minded autobiography from the New York radio personality.
Reared in middle-class Wayside, New Jersey, Williams knew from childhood that radio was her destiny. While a freshman at Northeastern, she approached the campus radio station and was soon reading the news on air. An internship at Boston’s number-one radio station led to a job offer in St. Croix. After only eight months on the island, Williams broke into the Washington, D.C., AM market. As her career was taking off, however, she developed a lengthy cocaine addiction. Despite the drugs and involvements with less-than-stellar men, Williams continued to achieve, eventually making it into the FM hip-hop market in New York City. She married, went through a messy divorce, and then met future husband Kevin, also involved in the business. They struggled to have a child, but right after the birth of their son, Williams discovered that Kevin was cheating on her. A quick trip to a private detective and the wronged wife realized that “ultimately speaking,” she won. Following this revelation is a transcript of a conversation with her husband describing the affair and its resolution, and the whole thing wraps up with author’s relationship rules and career advice—all of it embarrassingly simplistic. Instead of juicy insider gossip, Williams focuses strictly on herself. (She includes a brief mention of Salt N Pepa—but only because they invited her to replace their deejay, who was leaving to get married.) Despite her advice to readers that “there is no excuse for not being able to speak well,” Williams (or her coauthor) has chosen to write her narrative in the most casual of street slang. On competition from other deejays: “Bitches and niggas every day are practicing to do my shit.” On loyalty: “Don’t insist on it and then be a shady motherfucker.”
No bling-bling, no flava.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-7021-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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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