A misguided focus on sex and booze overshadows the moments of insight and inspiration.
A memoir of one young woman’s experience working as Ralph Reed’s spokeswoman.
This should be a fascinating book. After all, it describes Baron’s time as a single young socially moderate Jew working for Reed, the former director of the Christian Coalition, during a time when he was still politically powerful. The author seems to be counting on her readers to experience a certain amount of excitement from the revelation that Reed’s spokeswoman during this period was a sexually active lush. However, given the long list of prominent conservatives who have been caught doing much worse, her activities seem almost quaint. Though Baron claims that she “bares all,” most of what she shares is mundane: friendships with co-workers, relationship with her family, eventual marriage, nights spent getting drunk, casual sexual encounters. There are moments of real interest here—her description of making the leap from envelope-stuffing volunteer to the press room (by stepping past a temporary partition and commandeering a plant stand as a desk) show a glimpse of a plucky and smart young woman—and she offers a unique insider perspective on Reed’s reaction to the Abramoff scandal. The most shocking claim Baron makes may be the veiled suggestion, toward the end of the book, that Reed did, in fact, have a hand in those rumors about John McCain’s daughter in the 2000 South Carolina primary. Unfortunately, it seems the author decided that the nitty-gritty of real political work was less interesting than her love of vodka and grapefruit juice.
A misguided focus on sex and booze overshadows the moments of insight and inspiration.Pub Date: July 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8065-3415-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Citadel/Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
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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