Largely forgettable.
New York City woman-about-town’s memoir about her life-as-performance-art quest to be fashionably “uncool.”
Inspired by her experiences as a Bloomingdale’s Christmas elf, art-school grad and downtown NYC scenester Rev Jen (Live Nude Elf, 2009) began carefully forming her uncool identity in the early ’90s by wearing Spock-like elf-ear attachments. Recalling her days as a young Lower East Side denizen in the mid-’90s, Jen describes her tame arty antics as grand, anarchic gestures of rebellion against the fusty establishment. She became known for her reactionary Anti-Slam poetry night, which fostered an environment of cuddly uncritical acceptance for wannabe slam-poets with a strict set of rules against any kind of harassment from the audience. Her promotion of art-damaged egalitarianism extended to her creation of an all-admission clique called the “Art Stars,” which turned out to be little more than an alcoholic support group for directionless art-scene dregs. In between her persistently meaningless nightlife activities, she drifted from one low-paying job to the next, drank a lot, had sex with men who treated her badly, and experimented with LSD, all while managing to pay rent on her LES apartment. Rev Jen is perpetually obsessed with what’s “cool” and what’s “uncool,” and her actions always end up blurring the line between the two. Although she styled herself as an outcast rebelling against the prevailing highbrow culture of the day, the author seemed ultimately reluctant to mix with truly unhip people: like, say, her schoolmates who listened to Phil Collins and the Republican rednecks who frightened her at a Charlie Daniels concert. Naturally, as she attained local celeb status for being a kitsch-loving contrarian, she finally got to frolic among extremely “cool” people: namely, transgressive filmmaker Nick Zedd and hyper-confessional author Jonathan Ames, among others.
Largely forgettable.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-3166-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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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