A quirky book that unfortunately does not help further the dialogue about the difficult experience of coming out.
A series of essays that document the difficult task of self-acceptance.
After years without a relationship or a stable sexual preference, former BuzzFeed editor Heaney (Dear Emma, 2016, etc.) decided to take matters into her own hands and go at the same speed as her feelings—frantically, somewhat aimlessly—toward the uncertain question that loomed over her head: am I gay? It started with a feeling of displacement. “This world,” she writes, “in its forceful femaleness, was something that greatly appealed to me. I did not feel a part of it, but I found myself longing to be.” Then the author discovered The L Word, an all-female TV show centered around the lives of gay women. Quickly, Heaney’s desire increased. While in graduate school at the University of Minnesota, Heaney had her first girl crush, which ultimately opened the doors of her desire and allowed her to feel something real for another woman. The author organizes the book in essays, or extended moments, punctuated by brief memos in which she describes various interactions with women throughout her life. Though Heaney provides a singular look at the experience of coming out, the essays often feel predictable. For example: “I was fascinated by lesbians being lesbians and talking about lesbians, to a degree that didn’t seem fitting for someone who now identified as one herself.” Sometimes, Heaney seems to be living according to a guidebook of expectations of what lesbians are supposed to feel, act like, and talk about, based on a society that more often than not limits their liberties. Furthermore, the author’s voice, though relatable, is too frequently self-congratulatory. She discusses her previous memoir, Never Have I Ever (2014), so many times that readers might lose interest in wanting to read it.
A quirky book that unfortunately does not help further the dialogue about the difficult experience of coming out.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-18095-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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