Warts and all, but noted with love.
Martin recalls her father—“the King of Cool,” as hew was designated by Elvis Presley—with clear-eyed affection and understanding.
Martin, who could have been embittered by her sometimes rocky relations with her father, instead displays remarkable understanding of his complex temperament. An unemotional man, Dean disliked small talk and enjoyed golf because it was a game he could play without too much social interaction. He was disciplined and actually drank very little, though he gained a reputation as a drunk because he sometimes acted that way. Despite his success and wealth, Martin observes, he was “sometimes happiest when left alone.” She first describes Dean’s early career as a touring band singer, his marriage to her mother Betty, his association with Jerry Lewis, and his move to Hollywood. In 1949, when Martin was only a few months old, Dean left Betty for Jeanne, who became his second wife. For nine years, Martin and her three older siblings saw very little of their father. Life with their mother, at first a round of glamorous parties, grew grim as Betty’s drinking increased and the money evaporated; they moved into increasingly smaller homes, and elder sister Gina handled the childcare and housekeeping. In 1957, realizing that Betty could no longer care for her children, their Aunt Anne took them to Dean’s house. He got custody, and they would see very little of Betty in the years to come. Grateful for the stability and the opportunities stepmother Jeanne provided for them, Martin recalls the high points of those years: parties attended by Marilyn Monroe, meetings with Elvis and the Beatles, movie premieres. She deftly describes Dean’s Las Vegas acts, his hit songs (“Volare,” “That’s Amore,” etc.), and films like Ocean’s Eleven, a testament to his membership in the Rat Pack, and his close friendship with Frank Sinatra.
Warts and all, but noted with love.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-5043-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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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