Publisher's Weekly Review
Zara (Tortured Artists), a senior editor at Fast Company, takes an incisive, enlightening look at his trials and triumphs navigating the New York journalism world without a college degree. After completing 10th grade in Trenton, N.J., in 1986, Zara (who later obtained a GED) left high school and embarked on a series of minimum-wage jobs, picking up a heroin habit along the way. After getting clean and landing an unpaid internship at Show Business Weekly (which conveniently didn't inquire about his educational background), he secured a full-time position at the publication, later becoming a contributor to Condé Nast Traveler and Wired and a full-time reporter at Newsweek. All the while, Zara found himself just outside the industry's inner circle: "No matter how disparate and diverse my coworkers seem, they all share a collective experience--the college years and the college friends--that's completely foreign to me." Zara's tale is perfectly paced, told with powerful prose and invigorating candor. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, this must-read memoir offers hope to anyone who worries the weight of their past stands in the way of their future. Agent: Ryan D. Harbage, Fischer-Harbage. (May)
Kirkus Review
A memoir that demonstrates how to succeed in business without a pedigree. A journalist and senior news editor at Fast Company, Zara never graduated from an elite college. In fact, unlike most of his colleagues in journalism, he never went to college at all. A high school dropout, his only educational credential is a GED diploma. In a brisk, entertaining narrative, Zara recounts his bumpy path from a checkered school career that included many detentions, suspensions, and, finally, expulsion to an impressive position at a major media venue. Serious behavioral problems landed him in a psychiatric hospital when he was 16. In his teens, he was a punk rocker; by 22, he was a heroin addict working menial jobs to support a habit that he repeatedly tried to quit. Finally, after nine years living in Orlando and Seattle, he kicked drugs. In 2005, at the age of 35, he arrived in New York City. Searching for work, he found that the lack of a college degree loomed as a major impediment to his future no matter what job he applied for: "The educated, as a category, have a stranglehold on power and influence that is impossible to escape." Zara deliberately omitted listing his education on his resume, and even on dating apps, and he was consumed by worry that an interviewer would probe his background. One who didn't offered an unpaid internship at Show Business Weekly. Zara soon became the dying magazine's overworked editor. As he pursued his career as a writer (he got an agent and a book contract) and editor, he felt recurring anxiety at being "on the wrong side of the diploma divide," yet skepticism, too, about the value of higher education. "In a meritocracy," he writes, "there is no higher reward than to cast a smug eye on an ultra-successful career and say, I did it my way." A savvy account of an interesting life path. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Zara (Tortured Artists, 2012) lifts a curtain on the American education system and its impact on his professional life, writing with painstaking clarity of every step he's taken to get where he is. The result of this reflection is a powerful story paired with gorgeously crafted writing. Born into a middle-class New Jersey family, Zara's story begins with his failure to finish high school in the 1990s and ends with him being a leading editor at Fast Company magazine. In between, we see Zara struggle with heroin addiction and come out the other side, feeling like we are walking alongside him on the slush-drenched streets of a New York City winter, heading to another dead-end job. Zara's memoir goes beyond the average story of personal adversity. Through it all, he matches each setback with a palpable sense of hope; readers can't help but cheer for him, for example, when, working at Show Business Weekly, he takes the brunt of his boss' angry outbursts and mood swings. It's clear that Zara is meant for bigger things. More than anything, Zara writes a necessary and inspiring story about how we are more than our educational histories.
