A good thing this “toxic bachelor” isn’t looking for absolution—he won't likely be getting it from any but those initiated...
Mock-serious confessional memoir from journalist Marin, who displays an overdeveloped sense of entitlement and appreciation of his own sly humor as he attempts an ironical, insightful picaresque.
As his narrative begins, Marin is on the prowl for sex, having recently split with his wife of three years. He appears to be a fumbling, no-score kind of guy, but all too soon he’s achieved a “string of meaningless encounters.” He’s as ready as the next guy “to summon the Bachelor Beelzebub and bargain my soul for some Faustian kicks,” a stance that quickly gets tiresome. So do his would-be pithy observations: “Relationships are all variations on a school-yard dare: ‘I'll show you mine, you show me yours’ ”; “No guy wants to be alone. We want to be with other women. Then when we're out with other women we want to be alone”; “If only hothouse flowers didn't demand constant climate control”; and the running joke, “There are two kinds of women . . .” Marin’s prose suffers from a crabbed spontaneity, he provides too much detail, and many of the jokes lack enough spark to ignite a smudge fire. (Those years at the New York Times Sunday Styles section seem to have given him an inflated opinion of his own wit.) The author can, as he freely admits, be a lowlife, and when he says, “I'd seen flashes of neediness, humorlessness, and pretension. Which brought out in me flashes of disdain, acerbity, and superciliousness,” he might well be talking to the mirror. It isn't a big surprise that his most honest moments come when confessing his warped behavior to a purely platonic female friend; what does come as a surprise is how sensitively he writes of his father’s death.
A good thing this “toxic bachelor” isn’t looking for absolution—he won't likely be getting it from any but those initiated in his approach.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2003
ISBN: 0-7868-6882-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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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