A big, eminently readable story, deftly spun even if with few surprises.
A tale of boom and bust—but mostly bust—in the always-beckoning oil fields of Texas.
In this epic, comparatively modest in size but ambitious in scope, Lone Star State native and itinerant correspondent Mealer (Muck City: Winning and Losing in Football’s Forgotten Town, 2012, etc.) traces his family’s checkered history across generations, planting cotton, fighting wars, grieving for the fallen, and always looking for better things. “Only in Texas was there enough space for so many second acts,” he writes. Any reader of Larry McMurtry’s Thalia cycle of novels will know just what Mealer means, and in the largest sense, his story is pretty familiar ground: People get desperate in the absence of money and careless in the presence of it. The author takes his time setting a textured backdrop for his story: Oil came late to Texas, but when it arrived, it did so with more than a vengeance. Edna Ferber might have modeled Giant on some of Mealer’s characters, including a would-be baron whose sexual escapades got him thrown out of a country club, to which he replied, “I’ll build my own place.” The story eventually settles on Mealer’s father, who worked endlessly to make his own luck but almost always hit a bad streak when in the company of his best friend, a dashing, likable, yet unreliable fellow who was always on the make, selling one lease with one hand to buy another with the other, hiring staff without quite knowing what they could do, and buying planes and houses with money that wasn’t quite his. It was the Texas boom-and-bust tale all over again, punctuated with fistfuls of speed and long lines of cocaine; as Mealer writes, sagely, “it was hard to stay focused on Jesus when you were busy drilling for oil.” True enough: One minute Reagan is newly in office and you’re flush, the next he’s in trouble and you’re broke, and maybe you’ll see the ghost of Bob Wills on the way to the poorhouse—or the bank.
A big, eminently readable story, deftly spun even if with few surprises.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-05891-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2018
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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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