Whoopi Goldberg sparks 'jealousy' on The View with co-hosts as she skips show for a week
Goldberg, 69, who stated on the show last week that Black people in the US were as oppressed at citizens of the Iranian regime, will be skipping the show all week.
'We are all jealous of Whoopi today because she's in Italy — I hope it's 100 degrees,' The View host Joy Behar said at the top of Monday's show.
'She's in Italy accepting an award for her book Bits and Pieces, so she will be out this week.'
Behar will serve as moderator this week and Ana Navarro joined the panel for Monday's Hot Topics discussion.
The show will begin its annual hiatus June 30, and the Oscar winner will be back in her seat alongside Behar, Sunny Hostin, Sara Haines, Navarro, and Alyssa Farrah Griffin, when the chat show resumes on July 7.
'We are all jealous of Whoopi today because she's in Italy — I hope it's 100 degrees,' Joy Behar said at the top of Monday's show
Goldberg on social media shared a photo of her experience at the Taobuk-Taormina International Book Festival, which is in its 15th year.
'Thank you (Grazie!) @taobukfestival for giving me a beautiful experience in an extraordinary environment, an honorable award and your kindness,' she captioned the social media post. 'Books are so important to all the world.'
Goldberg's tome, Bits and Pieces: My Mother, My Brother and Me, received the Taobuk Award.
The Oscar winner looked elegant in a black and white jacket over a simple black collared dress with an A-line skirt.
The event was broadcast on television from the ancient Greek theater in the city of Taormina.
Leaders with the festival said in a statement on the website 'the theme chosen for the 15th edition of Taobuk, Boundaries , confronts us with a cultural, intellectual, and historical responsibility—one that demands depth of vision and inquiry, and from which we cannot and do not wish to shy away.
'This responsibility of vision has always been the driving force behind Taobuk's curatorial choices. In the etymology of the word boundaries — cum finis, which conveys the idea of a shared limit—lies the very complexity of this challenge, one of the most dramatic, intricate, and urgent issues of our time.'
Goldberg's memoir became an instant New York Times Bestseller when it was released May 7, as readers gave it 4.7 out of 5 stars based on over 3,600 Amazon reviews.
Goldberg garnered controversy Wednesday after making remarks about how she felt gay and Black people had been persecuted in the U.S.
Her controversial comments came after cohost Alyssa Farah Griffin pointed out how Iran's regime executed gay people and forced women into rigid dress codes.
Goldberg said: 'We have been known in this country to tie gay folks to the car - listen, I'm sorry - they used to just keep hanging black people; it is the same.'
Goldberg has served as a co-host and moderator on The View since 2007, replacing comedian Rosie O'Donnell.
She has past made headlines on the ABC series for her shock remarks on topics ranging from the Holocaust in 2022, to Mel Gibson to Roman Polanski in 2009.
In 2009, she said of Polanski's admitted act of sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977: 'I know it wasn't rape-rape.
'It was something else but I don't believe it was rape-rape. He went to jail and and when they let him out he was like, "You know what, this guy's going to give me a hundred years in jail. I'm not staying.' So that's why he left.'
She said in the same episode: 'We're a different kind of society, we see things differently ... would I want my 14-year-old having sex with somebody? Not necessarily, no.'
Goldberg's most recent comments led her to be targeted by multiple critics for her controversial commentary in the Instagram post she put up about her trip to Italy.
'You realize married women in Iran need their husband's permission to get a passport and travel?' said one social media user. 'Is there a law in America I am unaware of that states the same about black women in America?'
Said one commenter: 'Please move to Iran. And STAY there.'
One person asked the Hollywood veteran: 'How can you not be embarrassed to show your face in public?'
One social media user suggested, 'Why don't you visit Iran for a month and tell us how amazing it is.'
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The Sun
22 minutes ago
- The Sun
90s music legend reveals terrifying ordeal as intruder breaks into hotel room and bosses forced to beef up security
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The Guardian
33 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Skirting the issue: Designer dress goes missing from Bezos-Sánchez wedding
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More compelling than the fantasies themselves are the frequent glimpses into the women's real worlds. One contributor confesses that she fantasises about her partner's death – she longs to be free, because she has never explored her true feelings for women. Another writes that she brings herself to orgasm by thinking about her husband cheating on her. He has been unfaithful in reality, so every time she does this, she cries. The real-life loneliness conveyed here is much rawer than the wish-fulfilment. At its best, Want gives you privileged access into the most painful, truthful corners of these women's lives. Kitty Drake £9.89 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Fiction A transcendent late gift Rosarita Anita Desai Anita Desai's riddling and haunted new novel is set in motion when Bonita, a young Indian woman, meets a tricksy figure in a park in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. A student of Spanish, Bonita is leafing through local newspapers when she is approached. 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Yagnishsing Dawoor £8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop History An insider's take An African History of Africa Zeinab Badawi There is no shortage of big tomes about Africa written by old Africa hands – those white journalists, memoirists, travel writers or novelists who know Africa better than Africans. This genre, lampooned by Binyavanga Wainaina's satirical essay How to Write About Africa, weaves together stories that exalt the continent's landscape but decry its politics, that revere its wildlife but patronise its people, that use words such as 'timeless', 'primordial' and 'tribal' when explaining Africa's historical trajectories. Zeinab Badawi's An African History of Africa is a corrective to these narratives. Ambitious in scope and refreshing in perspective, the book stretches from the origins of Homo sapiens in east Africa through to the end of apartheid in South Africa. It is informed by interviews Badawi conducted with African scholars and cultural custodians, whose expertise, observations and wisdom are threaded through the book. The very act of telling African history from an African perspective and making this history accessible to a wide audience is an assertion of dignity and an invitation to learn more. As Badawi puts it: 'I hope I have demonstrated that Africa has a history, that it is a fundamental part of our global story, and one that is worthy of greater attention and respect than it has so far received.' She most certainly has. Simukai Chigudu £9.89 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Biography Friendship and rivalry in LA Didion & Babitz Lili Anolik Journalist Lili Anolik's latest book is a 'provocation', a dual biography of the two friends who carved their initials on to the counterculture of 1960s and 1970s California. Joan Didion used her reporting skills to fashion herself into a serious-minded literary titan, while Eve Babitz's novels and essay collections, compiled from the same social scenes but shaped more loosely and with greater spirit, fell into relative obscurity. That is, until Anolik tracked Babitz down in 2012, by then seriously ill and living in squalor. Anolik became obsessed, helping to restore Babitz's reputation as a writer and chronicler of Los Angeles life, eventually writing the 2019 biography Hollywood's Eve. 'My preoccupation was unbalanced, fetishistic,' she admits here. This time, Anolik uses Didion as the headliner, though seemingly through gritted teeth. When Babitz died, aged 78, in 2021 – just days before Didion, who was 87 – her sister Mirandi discovered boxes of papers in the back of a wardrobe. Anolik was reeled in by an excoriating but unsent letter from Babitz to Didion, which she chooses to interpret as a platonic 'lovers' quarrel'. Babitz assails her friend and occasional collaborator (Didion briefly edited Babitz's first collection, before Babitz 'fired' her) for what she perceives as Didion's dislike of women, her contempt for art, and her deference to her husband. Anolik takes this wounded screed and runs with it, replaying Babitz's story through its entanglements with Didion's. This is vivid, entertaining stuff and often gallops along as if it's been up all night at one of Didion and Dunne's notorious Franklin Avenue gatherings, but it is, perhaps, more provocative than entirely convincing. Rebecca Nicholson £9.89 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Essays Portrait of the artists The Position of Spoons Deborah Levy "It is a writing adventure to go in deep, then deeper, and then to play with surface so that we become experts at surface and depth,' writes Deborah Levy, and it's as good a statement of intent as any in this collection, which delves into topics both trivial and profound: brothel creepers, car crashes, lemon curd, trauma. The theme, insofar as there is one, is the artists who have inspired her. Many of these are women, and Levy writes skilfully on the complex interplay of self-presentation and effacement that's often demanded of female creativity. Lee Miller 'both hides from and gives herself to the camera'; Francesca Woodman makes 'herself present by making herself absent'. Artists and writers invent things, but they invent themselves too. Levy is good on the prices we find ourselves paying: for art, for love, for fitting in. Of Ann Quin, the avant garde, working-class writer who drowned herself in the sea off Brighton, she says: 'I want to know more about what it took to want to swim home and I know Quin could have told me.' In another short piece called Values and Standards, she writes about an acquaintance she sometimes meets at the school gates. This woman's husband takes pleasure in humiliating her; to survive, 'she had removed her own eyes and saw the world and herself through his eyes'. Levy wonders if she ever 'puts her own eyes back in', and considers her own narrowing of vision at times when 'other things had become bigger. Perhaps overwhelming.' Here is Levy on the French writer and film-maker Marguerite Duras: 'She thinks as deeply as it is possible to think without dying of pain … She puts everything in to language. The more she puts in, the fewer words she uses.' At her best, Levy pulls off a similar feat, plunging into the depths, taking us with her. Freya Berry £9.89 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Poetry A dazzling voice Bad Diaspora Poems Momtaza Mehri The long-awaited debut collection from the former Young People's Poet Laureate for London invites readers to consider the concept of diaspora. Mehri brings unflinching discursive skills to verse that melds criticism, autobiography and essay while still achieving a crisp sonic momentum characteristic of lyric poetry. The meanings of diaspora in this collection are as varied as the forms Mehri deploys: prose poems, found poems, poems using emojis and erasures. 'Diaspora is witnessing a murder without getting blood on your shirt.' 'I don't want to guard something I don't own.' Mehri finds a new tone somewhere between Gwendolyn Brooks's effortless musicality and Carolyn Forché's noun-laced haunting intensity. Hers is a dazzling voice that refuses to speak from a podium, preferring to examine guilt, culture and personhood from within the 'nightly decision' of community. Oluwaseun Olayiwola £9.89 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Fiction Life after the apocalypse Juice Tim Winton Tim Winton and speculative fiction may seem an odd combination. His novels excel at the here and now, depicting lives at the margins, young love and young parenthood, violence at the hands of fathers. But the harsh beauty of the western Australian landscape has long been a presence in his work, and Winton has also long highlighted his country's fragility in the face of climate chaos, and been fiercely critical of the exploitation of Australia's mineral wealth. So the cli-fi premise of Juice, his latest novel, could be a perfect Winton fit. Set in an unspecified future, some centuries from now, the book opens on a man and a girl driving across a landscape blackened by ashes. The hellscape is worthy of the Mad Max franchise, with slave colonies springing up from the parched earth like termite mounds. There are echoes of Cormac McCarthy's The Road here, too, in the black dust thrown up by the vehicle's tyres, and in the child passenger, observing everything with a mute wariness. And Winton's ending is a masterstroke, the heart-in-your-mouth final chapter one of the best things I've read in a long time. Rachel Seiffert £8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Fiction A historic hero Yorùbá Boy Running Biyi Bándélé Like the protagonist of Yorùbá Boy Running, Biyi Bándélé had been running from a young age. At 14, he won a writing competition at school; another award in his 20s, for his radio play script Rain, took him to London in 1990. He hit the ground running there, publishing his first novel, The Man Who Came in from the Back of Beyond, in 1991. This was the beginning of a prolific and multifaceted career that, sadly, came to an end when Bándélé died suddenly in 2022 at the age of 54. At the time he was putting the finishing touches to his film adaptation of Wole Soyinka's play Death and the King's Horseman – a play very much centred on death and redemption and now available on Netflix as Elesin Oba: The King's Horseman. He was also working on this posthumous novel, Yorùbá Boy Running, partly inspired by the history of Bándélé's great-grandfather, who, like his protagonist, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, was formerly enslaved. One doesn't come to a posthumous novel for its perfect finish; not all the sections of the book are as polished or as inventive as the opening part. The editors have done a great job of ordering and signposting the different sections with dates and thematic headings, making it easier to follow the sometimes intricate chronology of the narrative. We are lucky and grateful that the author was able to leave us with this bookend to his glorious if truncated career that began long ago in Kafanchan, Nigeria, when he started running towards a distinguished future in faraway London. Helon Habila £8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop
