Uneven, forced humorous essays on mundane topics.
Comic and essayist Notaro (The Potty Mouth at the Table, 2013 etc.) is back with another round of commentaries on her semiscattered life.
Whether she's depicting her childhood dumpster-diving for her grandfather, who displayed the weird items she found in the backyard, sharing her Nana's recipes for meatballs, gravy, and vodka sauce, or complaining about the pronunciations used in a cheese-making class, the author attempts to find humor in everything—even things that aren't funny. She discusses raising chickens in the backyard, the demise of the Twinkie, making jerky treats for her dog, being overweight (“So. The Fat Talk. We were having the Fat Talk. In a doctor’s office because my doctor was too chicken shit to call me fat to my face. Instead, he sent his formerly fat nurse to break the news to me that I was chubby”), and basically anything else that has happened to her, to someone she knows, or even to complete strangers. Occasionally, the author hits the mark, as in her title essay, in which she chronicles her attempts to work her way through a clear-the-clutter-toward-a-better-and-more-spiritual-life book. Regarding her attempts to cull her collection of books: “But when I got to the part where she talks about throwing away books that hadn't been read, I had enough and closed the book. Those words are nothing short than the rantings of a lunatic. Madness….Tossing books you've never read is not just a sin, it's a crime, one worthy of capital punishment. Frankly, if I walk into your house and you don't have 200 books in there somewhere that you haven't read yet, I don't trust you." Overall, the laugh track is turned up too high for comfort, with the effects being pushed on readers without much subtlety. But for those who like trite, in-your-face sitcom humor, this will appeal.
Uneven, forced humorous essays on mundane topics.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-88608-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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