A perceptive, though dark, portrait.
An unsparing look at the abrasive performer.
Cultural critic Siegel (Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, 2008, etc.), winner of the National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism, contributes to the Jewish Lives series with a biography of the misogynist, disdainful Julius Henry Marx, nicknamed Groucho because of his “sour, bitter nature.” Siegel argues that Groucho’s stage persona was consistent with his real personality: “Groucho embodies the spirit of nihilism,” the author asserts, “yet his biographers and various commentators always try to impart some positive or affirmative quality to him.” He finds the sources of that nihilism in his early life: the middle son of five brothers, he had a “marginal position in his parents’ household.” The most intellectual of his siblings, he wanted to become a physician. Instead, his mother yanked him out of grade school and sent him out to work to earn money for the impoverished family. His father was weak-willed, his mother domineering, and the young boy, “wounded by his mother,” became a performer “whose aggression toward women is at the forefront of every film.” Siegel analyzes—and sometimes overanalyzes—the Marx Brothers’ movies, identifying instances of Groucho’s “abuse and invective” to show how his routines “on stage and screen were seamless with the rhythms of his temperament as he passed through everyday life.” In keeping with this series’ focus on Jewish identity, Siegel examines Marx’s connection to his cultural heritage. He concludes that his comedy “has deep roots in Jewish forms of irony and social dissent,” disdain for authority, and sense of displacement and ostracism that resulted in “explicit contempt for other people.” The man who emerges from these pages is difficult, unlikable, and brash, and his humor coarse. Siegel identifies Lenny Bruce as his heir rather than Woody Allen, with whom he is sometimes compared.
A perceptive, though dark, portrait.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-300-17445-8
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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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