Like the rough draft for the real memoir, the one with a personality included.
The life and times of the novelist, screenwriter, Hollywood mini-mogul and borderline workaholic.
Sheldon came from humble beginnings in Depression-era Chicago to become the brand-name author of airport bestsellers (Are You Afraid of the Dark?, 2004, etc.). Although this memoir mostly catalogues his successes, Sheldon begins by revealing that in 1934, when he was 17 and working at a drugstore, he was stealing sleeping pills so that he could commit suicide. Despondent that his life wasn’t going anywhere, he was determined to do the deed just as his father walked in on him. A born salesman, Otto Schechtel was able to talk his son out of it, but that seems about the last positive thing he did. Sheldon worked desperately to become successful, even changing his last name at the advice of a manager, and there’s some genuinely entertaining material here covering his ascension to film- and bestsellerdom. An impressive combination of chutzpah, writing talent and blind luck led him from Tin Pan Alley to Hollywood, where he was soon knocking out B-picture screenplays. Broadway shows followed, as did A-list picture credits (he won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer), and eventually Sheldon joined the ranks of megawatt producers. That whole business about his being the most-translated novelist in the world—he is listed in the Guinness Book of Records—comes later, more as an afterthought. It’s his success in the movie biz that Sheldon wants to talk about. Among other things, it’s an opportunity for name-dropping, a habit he overindulges in.
Like the rough draft for the real memoir, the one with a personality included.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-446-53267-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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