Chatty, breezy and often hilarious: an enjoyable reminder that it’s best not to take things like the “blood-sucking undead”...
NPR contributor Nuzum (Parental Advisory: Music Censorship in America, 2001) humorously sinks his teeth into the elusive, enshrouded world of vampirism.
He launches his quest for immersion in vampirism with a clumsy attempt to drink his own blood from a shot glass. Then he watches every vampire movie ever made—605 in all. Conclusion? “They suck.” Attempting “to understand what it means to be a vampire,” he spends a thankless weekend playing one in a local haunted house. At home in Washington, D.C., Nuzum conducts an unrevealing interview with a wily group of self-declared vampires initially contacted via Meetup.com. In California, a plucky guide who calls herself Countess Mina—“Mina Harker from the novel…turned into a vampire and then sent to San Francisco by Count Dracula himself”—energetically dispels “a lot of Hollywood’s lies” in her vampire-themed tours. Nuzum joins an eclectic group hosted by former child actor Butch Patrick, who played Eddie Munster on TV, for a trek through the ominous castles and monasteries of central Romania to discover the real history of torturous prince Vlad Dracula. Wife Katherine comes along on a brisk jaunt to England to view historic Highgate Cemetery and the significant Whitby Abbey. Less interesting are visits to the topless vampire revue Bite in Las Vegas and a party thrown by the curiously aloof “vampyre society of greater New York,” aka the Court of Lazarus. Nor do Nuzum’s frequent detours from bats and fangs to address issues like AIDS, bareback sex, Netflix, etc., really gel with all the blood facts, word origins and extensive meditations on Bram Stoker and his Dracula. Still, you have to admire a guy who adroitly plods through episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a Dark Shadows convention, all the while disbursing such random footnotes as, “there never was anyone named Count Dracula.”
Chatty, breezy and often hilarious: an enjoyable reminder that it’s best not to take things like the “blood-sucking undead” too seriously.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-37111-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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