The ending of the book—the kids grown, the parents’ move to sell the course—leaves a wistful feeling, but like mini-golf...
The story of a girl, her family and the miniature golf course they owned.
Miniature golf—or “putt-putt,” depending on where you’re playing—is one of those activities that can be hard to pigeonhole. It’s not quite a sport, per se, but it does have a professional association (the USPMGA, of course)—i.e., more than a game but not quite at the same level as bowling. Without a doubt, though, it is a family pastime, a place to take children on the weekend—until your family buys a miniature golf course, and then it’s your job. At age 10, Melby found herself thrilled to hear her father ask if they’d like to buy Tom Thumb Miniature Golf in Waupaca, Wisconsin. As is the case with many such amusement places, it’s one thing to visit them for a round of putt-putt; it’s another thing entirely to be personally involved with the upkeep of the course, the management of the customers (who don’t always recognize where the course ends and the owner’s personal residence begins), and the birds with their nests and their offspring and their cavalier approach to waste management. Melby has written for National Lampoon and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, which is a good indicator of the approach she takes in this witty memoir. Starting with a dryly cautionary few pages advising readers to never go to Wisconsin, each chapter is dedicated to a hole on the course. As the family goes from stumbling new entrepreneurs, the former owner having left no useful instructions, to fairly successful small-business owners, Melby and her siblings grow up.
The ending of the book—the kids grown, the parents’ move to sell the course—leaves a wistful feeling, but like mini-golf itself, the story is a lot of fun and enjoyable to navigate.Pub Date: July 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9831-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
PROFILES
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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