A fervent portrait of the artist as a young screw-up—an old one, too, who writes like an avenging angel.
Noted crime writer Ellroy (Blood’s a Rover, 2009, etc.) presents a sharp-tongued, acidic memoir of his life and loves.
The author’s loose-living mother, Jean Hilliker, has figured deeply in his previous work—one need only read The Black Dahlia (1987); his father less so, and Ellroy paints him memorably: “He had the bunco-artist gab and the grin…He dodged work and schemed like Sergeant Bilko and the “Kingfish” on Amos & Andy. The pastor at my church called him ‘the world’s laziest white man.’ He had a sixteen-inch schlong. It dangled out of his shorts. All his friends talked about it. This is not a wacked-out children’s reconstruction.” That’s a volatile combination sure to leave marks on a young boy’s psyche, but it’s the mother’s curse—to say just what it is would steal some of Ellroy’s thunder—that really does him in. The author’s ’50s is not that of Leave It to Beaver—not with Dad and Mom setting the examples. By the time he was 13, Ellroy was chugging cheap wine, peeping into windows and reading deeply into warlock-haunted literature that “formally sanctioned me to lie still and conjure women.” Ah, and the women he conjured. There’s Susan, who swigged cough syrup and downed stolen pills with him (“we talked classical music shit endlessly”); Charlotte (who “thought I drank too much”); Helen (“I lacked her omnivorous view of the world in all its lively flux. She lacked my brutal will”; and…well, a lot of ands, remembered over half a century in this Nabokovian exercise in time travel, with confessions of vice and addiction and, mostly, half-truths told and believed. It’s vintage Ellroy, full of bile and invective and utterly unsparing to anyone—including the author himself, who manages to let slip away most of the good things he finds and spends a few fortunes in the bargain, yet keeps on plugging.
A fervent portrait of the artist as a young screw-up—an old one, too, who writes like an avenging angel.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-59350-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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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