Like spending time with your least ambitious and most charming friend.
Droll account of a circuitous path to responsible adulthood.
Enabled by a monthly allowance from her parents, Klam rolled through her 20s and into her 30s in a nebulous haze of bourgeois depression and daydreams about making it as a writer. Weeks and months floated by as she spent entire days listening to her headphones while walking around Manhattan in overalls, now and then reluctantly clocking in to work in her father’s office. Occasionally, her not-very-post-adolescent torpor was interrupted by an interview for a job as, say, Barbra Streisand’s assistant, or by an affair with a parasitic ex-con whose sponginess and lack of interest in being accountable rivaled the author’s. This material could well be annoying if Klam weren’t so funny, setting her scenes with an incisive, self-deprecating slant. Her memoir isn’t driven by action, but by conversational humor and revealing, original stories. (When her therapist touted the satisfactions of self-sufficiency, she countered, “But isn’t there also a satisfaction in getting someone to take care of you?”) Another appealing highlight is the author’s engaging rapport with her mother. Despite her avowed laziness, Klam landed a writing job at VH1, where she met her future husband and was nominated for an Emmy. The weakest part of the book is devoted to her obsession with such wedding trappings as a diamond ring and a tiara, the only acceptable accessories for “a beautiful princess in a ball gown.” Subsequent pages atone by chronicling Klam’s late introduction to real life. Her husband grappled with serious diabetes and joblessness; she sold her jewelry and was forced to find her professional footing. She gave birth to a daughter and found moderate financial success as a freelance writer for women’s magazines. Today she relishes, albeit somewhat sardonically, the rewarding flipside of growing up.
Like spending time with your least ambitious and most charming friend.Pub Date: March 27, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59448-980-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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