A stunning portrait, intriguing with unanswerable questions. (Photos throughout)
The colorful, engrossing story of Helle Nice—exotic dancer, race-car driver, accused Nazi collaborator—told with considerable élan by biographer Seymour (Mary Shelley, 2001, etc.).
Daughter of a French provincial postmaster, Nice (1900–84) gained a certain notoriety as a nude dancer in Paris during the period after WWI (“nakedness, at the upper end of the market which they aimed to please, was softly lit and always in the best of taste”). But once she passed her driving test, it was cars she communed with. When a ski injury ended her career as a dancer, she was more than happy to take up life behind the wheel, with the support of her innumerable lovers. Seymour depicts a dangerous life: Nice arrived at her first Grand Prix after “a mixture of morphine, champagne, and sex had left her wanting to crawl into a coal hole.” She won anyway. Generally considered one of the two finest female racing drivers in Europe between the wars, Nice had to prove her worth time and again, on terrifying dirt tracks that claimed life after life and on claustrophobic speed bowls. She was one of the very few women who dared to race against men. Seymour adeptly paints Nice’s decline and fall. In 1936, she suffered a horrible accident in Brazil; a photo shows her cartwheeling from her auto in the midst of a high-speed crash. Later that same year, she was investigated for smuggling cars. Then, most damning, in 1949 Nice was publicly denounced by a fellow driver as a former Gestapo agent. Seymour thinks not: “ . . . her collaboration, if she was guilty of it, might only have taken the pragmatic form of being on good terms with the occupiers. She liked enjoying herself.” The accuser withdrew his allegation, but Nice’s career was over; she died penniless and forgotten.
A stunning portrait, intriguing with unanswerable questions. (Photos throughout)Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6168-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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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