Grier’s iconic force fails to translate to the page—a disappointment for fans of her unforgettable performances and reign as...
Screen goddess Grier reflects on her life as an Army brat and showbiz icon, to middling effect.
The author recounts her rural, peripatetic childhood, marred by two horrific rapes and her parents’ divorce, in clear, lucid prose that promises compelling anecdotes and insights regarding her career as a cult “blaxploitation” movie icon. Unfortunately, Grier glosses over the productions of such deathless classics as Coffy, Foxy Brown and The Big Doll House, offering only perfunctory, generic observations about the films and milieu that made her a household name. Instead, the author concentrates on her personal relationships—engaging stuff when the memories involve the likes of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Richard Pryor, and Freddie Prinze, less so when she laments her breakups with “civilians” and problems with various family members. Grier has had her share of bad luck with men, including Abdul-Jabbar’s increasing dedication to Islam and embracing of anti-woman conventions, which ended a long and previously fulfilling union, while Pryor and Prinze flamboyantly self-destructed with drugs. Grier also survived a serious bout with cancer, and has much to say on the subject of racism in America, sadly none of it particularly interesting. The author’s reluctance to delve deeply into her acting work becomes increasingly frustrating as the memoir plods on. She briefly discusses Quentin Tarantino’s rehearsal-heavy technique while discussing her late-career triumph Jackie Brown, fleetingly mentioning co-star Robert Forster, with whom she created one of modern cinema’s most affecting and charming later-in-life romances. On her Showtime series The L Word, Grier deigns only to remark on the importance of the subject matter and how terrific and supportive the cast was. She also describes a wig worn on the show as “The Beast,” endowing it with more personality than any of the members of that wonderfully supportive cast.
Grier’s iconic force fails to translate to the page—a disappointment for fans of her unforgettable performances and reign as the queen of blaxploitation.Pub Date: April 28, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-54850-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Punk Planet/Akashic
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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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