Smart, disarming, and forgivably sentimental.
A former television star who took to the trail extols a disappearing way of life.
Parker, star of ’80s detective drama Simon and Simon, has almost nothing to say about his acting career, other than to discuss why it eventually became enervating. Instead, his debut memoir begins when he leaves LA for parts just slightly east and deeper into the American West: the California ranch country of the Sierras. With his horse-loving wife Darleen, the author joins up with local cowboys, seeking to learn just how this quintessentially western job is done today. Whenever possible, he pitches in on cattle drives, helps out at brandings, looks on at auctions, and asks questions of men who excel in giving one- and two-word answers. Deeply enamored of this life rooted in the land, Parker takes the reader along on his beginner’s tour of the basics of the cowboy way. He may know little about herding balky cattle, avoiding cantankerous bulls, or heating branding irons, but he’s endlessly eager. Local trainers are profiled with deep admiration and respect. Cattlemen and cowboys are drawn with admiring strokes. The economics and politics of ranching, a true morass, are examined with a respectable attempt at evenhandedness. The habits of cows and horses come in for scrutiny, and Parker’s mare, Miss Flirt, is a character in her own right. The only digressions are periodic references to the traumatic shooting that resulted in a depression that led, in turn, to the author leaving Hollywood. Most of the limelight, however, is reserved for the cowmen. Perhaps most surprising are Parker’s writing chops: the language is expressive and intelligent, despite the author’s best efforts to imitate his laconic heroes.
Smart, disarming, and forgivably sentimental.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-31024-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
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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