Eden comes clean. Squeaky clean.
The author recounts her life story in a charmingly effervescent manner, but there just isn’t much there—an unremarkable girlhood, some familiar struggling-to-break-into-showbiz anecdotes, middling success as an entertainer (excluding her defining role as TV’s “Jeannie”) and family difficulties that, while sad, fail to add much heft to the skimpy narrative. It seems odd to pen a showbiz memoir about not sleeping with Elvis, Warren Beatty or Sammy Davis Jr., but Eden is eager to portray herself as a wholesome good girl repeatedly scandalized by the sexual and chemical habits familiar to anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of Hollywood. Her hit sitcom, I Dream of Jeannie, is a perplexingly enduring piece of pop culture, an inane fantasy distinguished only by its questionable sexual politics—a topic Eden dismisses out of hand, pleading the show’s status as simple entertainment. But what other reason is there for discussing it? Eden’s descriptions of costar Larry Hagman’s obnoxious on-set antics are amusing, but she shies away from exploring the profound psychological and emotional problems that must have generated such erratic and appalling behavior. There is authentic pain in her descriptions of an abusive marriage and the drug addiction and fatal overdose suffered by her son, but it’s difficult to muster sympathy in the face of the author’s overwhelming obliviousness in her response to these realities. Eden comes across as a nice person with a modicum of charm, but a more pointless memoir is difficult to imagine. Irredeemably minor but inoffensive, like a half-remembered episode of a silly sitcom.
Pub Date: April 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-88694-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
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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