A professionally reported account, but it’s difficult to imagine an audience other than those with a pre-existing personal...
Gossipy, depressing chronicle of ossified Florida high society.
Nonfiction vet Leamer (Fantastic: the Life of Arnold Schwarzenegger, 2005, etc.) moved with his wife to Palm Beach in 1994. Long a miner of celebrity gossip for his books, he found himself sinking deeper and deeper into the snobbish, wealth-soaked milieus of both Palm Beaches—one dominated by Protestants, the other by Jews. The two sometimes meet, but only superficially and rarely without resentment. Selecting from hundreds of potential protagonists, the author settles on about a dozen, alternating their sagas with sweeping observations about what he sees as a unique social setting. Some of the story lines involve suicide, some murder. Most of the rest portray poorly matched couples of wealthy, vain old men and ambitious young women trying either to claw their way to the top of Palm Beach society or to retain their hegemony over it. The overarching theme is that egregious wealth never buys happiness, at least not for long. Leamer injects himself into the narrative frequently. He observes the gala events, sometimes as an invited guest. He becomes a confidant of certain Palm Beach queens and kings—female and male, heterosexual and homosexual, those born rich and those who have married into wealth. To his credit, he almost always uses real names and immediately informs readers when employing a pseudonym. Stars and supporting players alike are either relentlessly mean or utterly hapless. Leamer conveys the bizarre absurdity of it all, as when an exclusive club makes grudging adjustments to its rigid code regarding the physical appearance of guests in order to accommodate members’ tattoo-sporting or bodily pierced grandchildren. Required to place Band-Aids over the offending markings, “a young guest enters the dining room so swathed in bandages that she looks as if she has just left intensive care.”
A professionally reported account, but it’s difficult to imagine an audience other than those with a pre-existing personal interest in Palm Beach.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4013-2291-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
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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