Alternately grating and amusing, Oxford skips the most interesting part of her life: her canny use of Twitter.
Autobiographical vignettes from Twitter comedian Oxford.
These stories fall into roughly three stages of the author’s life: obnoxiously precocious childhood, confused young adulthood and parenthood. When Oxford tells us about her childhood and teen years, she doesn't hold back, giving us mortifying stories about wetting herself in a gas station and puking in her friend's father's car before a party. She also comes across as somewhat bratty and entitled. Her young adulthood was appropriately wacky. She flew from Canada to Los Angeles on a whim in a desperate attempt to meet Leonardo DiCaprio and bought, then sold, a dilapidated camper van. When describing her adulthood and parenthood, she grows into her precociousness. "An Open Letter to the Nurse Who Gave Me an Enema Bottle” is entertaining, and the last sentence is genuinely funny and unexpected. "How I Met Your Father" is sweetly raunchy, the kind of story that will horrify her children but delight her grandchildren. As amusing as some of these stories are, Oxford is a mostly unremarkable writer with a remarkable claim to fame: her successful use of Twitter to gain an audience for her humor and writing. Yet this, the most interesting fact about her, receives very little attention in the book. She does share her experience meeting David Copperfield as a result of a Twitter exchange, but the story readers will most likely want to hear—how she got started with Twitter and how her tweets got the attention of significant public figures like Copperfield and Roger Ebert—is absent from the narrative.
Alternately grating and amusing, Oxford skips the most interesting part of her life: her canny use of Twitter.Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210222-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
