Written from the amen corner, nothing here will perturb the rapper’s worshippers.
Fevered hagiography of the prominent rapper and recent movie star.
Former Rolling Stone editor Bozza’s encounters with Marshall Mathers (Eminem) while writing a 1999 RS cover story form the backbone of this extended profile. At that time, Bozza recalls, Eminem was on the verge of stardom, yet still scuffling and more inclined to let his guard down: “He told me as much as he’d told any journalist . . . to the healthy dismay of his eavesdropping manager.” During their travels together, he observed an Ecstasy-fueled Eminem win over both white and black audiences in different clubs; beyond these sorts of recollections, the text essentially collects sketches and observations documenting Eminem’s rise from late-’90s regional “battle rapper” to parent-scaring boogeyman “Slim Shady,” transformed in 2002 into mainstream media darling by the film 8 Mile. Bozza grasps how Eminem’s mass appeal transcends race and age. The hip-hop community perceives him as having “paid his dues”; the ugly elements of his work resonate with an under-25 generation familiar with promiscuity, substance abuse, and domestic entanglements; and baby boomers embrace him, the author suggests, in order to be associated with youthful hipness. Although Bozza intends this as “an analysis, as much of America as . . . Eminem,” his unabashed sycophancy renders it mainly supportive of his opinion that “Eminem is hip-hop’s signpost artist, the one gifted enough to blend black and white musical and cultural elements without compromising the integrity of the music.” He supports this stance with the accolades of critics like Shelby Steele, only briefly considering and never really refuting the views of those who consider his hero a bully or corporate shill. Eventually, Bozza produces shrewd chapters on the music industry and the evolution of hip-hop in decayed, tense locales like Detroit, but only zeitgeist-chasers and youngsters who love Eminem are likely to make it that far.
Written from the amen corner, nothing here will perturb the rapper’s worshippers.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-5059-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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 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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