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THE BASSOON KING

MY LIFE IN ART, FAITH, AND IDIOCY

Certainly for fans of The Office, but the amiable actor also offers thoughtful glimpses into the realities of the TV and...

The actor best known for playing Dwight Schrute on The Office and founder of the inspirational website and media company SoulPancake shares tales of his awkward youth and later adventures as a struggling actor in New York and Los Angeles—a journey sustained by his lasting commitment to the Baha’i faith.

Beginning with a foreword written in the voice of Schrute, Wilson (co-author: SoulPancake: Chew on Life's Big Questions, 2010) is quick to set an irreverent though somewhat self-conscious tone that dominates the early chapters. The only child of “pseudo hippie,” “oddball” parents, the author recalls his early years as a self-described geek, punctuated by activities ranging from bassoon playing to marathon games of Dungeons & Dragons. His family relocated back and forth from Seattle to Nicaragua and later to the Chicago suburbs, where, as a teenager, he gained a modicum of social acceptance through his interest and emerging talent in dramatic arts: “I had moved from regular geek/nerd to the very top of the geek/nerd hierarchy, DRAMA geek/nerd.” These chapters feature over-the-top anecdotes, extended footnotes, and trivia lists, including “Compendium of Comic Sidekicks,” “The Greatest Albums of the Early Eighties,” and “Shitty Jobs” (busboy, security guard, dishwasher, traffic-counter guy). Unfortunately, these comedic devices seldom hit the hilarious marks he’s intending, and comparisons will likely be drawn to gifted humorists such as bestselling author and former Office alum Mindy Kaling. Wilson’s narrative gathers momentum and insight when he recounts his years as a drama student at NYU, which led to film and TV work. The author also provides vivid descriptions of working on the set of The Office and deeper revelations about his spiritual path.

Certainly for fans of The Office, but the amiable actor also offers thoughtful glimpses into the realities of the TV and film industry and an impassioned rationale for living an openly spiritual life.

Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-525-95453-8

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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GENGHIS KHAN AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD

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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