A potentially dramatic story about the price of the fast life, unfortunately drowned by an adolescent mindset.
A wannabe model bottoms out in LA.
This thinly fictionalized story of onetime model Tobi Tobin is another in a long and somewhat venerable tradition of books about shallow young women who go in pursuit of shallow things and are ultimately swallowed up and spit out by the infernal LA glamour machine. Determined to escape the boredom of her teenage life, young Tobi drinks, smokes, and sleeps around before leaping at the chance to become a model. The inevitable disappointments that follow are only alluded to in a patchwork quilt of flashback and memories—unfortunately shot through with screenplay-style dialogue exchanges and even voice-over narration. The author’s “memoir”/first novel is largely set years later in LA as Tobi struggles to keep her low position in the business, finding modeling and acting gigs hard to come by. Eventually, she gets lucky and lands a job working the door at a new nightclub. In many ways, it’s a dream job, since it pays in cash, allows Tobi to sleep in, provides her with plentiful industry contacts and free booze, and demands that she exercise her inner snob by determining who should and shouldn’t be allowed in. These passages, which mostly come later in the story, are by far the most interesting and exciting, and indeed an entire book could have been written just about the ups and downs of the job. For Tobi, as well as for the reader, it’s a huge letdown, then, when the narrator goes home after work and sinks into a bath of self-pity—the author’s attempt to give her character a soul by allowing her to feel pity for various caricatures, like the angelic homeless kid who hangs by the entrance to her club every night, only reinforces a sense of irritating self-involvement.
A potentially dramatic story about the price of the fast life, unfortunately drowned by an adolescent mindset.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-6496-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: MTV Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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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