Wry memoir from an Eastern European indie-rock sensation.
A significant strength of this literary debut from singer Simone—whose second full-length original album will be released this fall—is her prose style, which is vibrant, taut and humorous. Born in Ukraine, she emigrated with her family to Massachusetts in the waning days of Soviet rule, after her professor father ran afoul of the KGB. The author amusingly portrays this experience as having transformed her family into caustic Kafkaesque eccentrics. The young Simone’s response was to retreat into bohemian creativity. One chapter documents the bittersweet review of artsy VHS tapes she made with a teenage pal who went on to fame in the Dresden Dolls. The author married young and pursued a career making independent folk-rock that, for a number of years, seemed cursed. After a particularly futile and creepy audition, she writes, “There is a certain peace that comes with the realization you aren’t ruining anyone’s life but your own.” Yet, over time, Simone managed to build an enthusiastic, cultish audience, bolstered in 2008 with her release of an album honoring Yanka Dyagileva, a Russian folk-punk performer who’d died mysteriously. The most provocative and engaging chapters document the author’s wanderlust. In addition to touring the country, playing her music in run-down venues, she traveled on multiple occasions to Siberia, her remote hometown and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. At points, she departs on spiritual tangents, as when she discusses her obsessive research on the Skoptsy, an obscure 19th-century Russian sect that practiced castration—she found this a good conversational topic for discouraging nightclub suitors. The chapters that focus on her travails as a Brooklyn-based aspiring musician are both less interesting and more familiar than Simone seems to perceive. The author skillfully captures the forlorn waiting-to-be-famous existence of young creative people, yet these passages become somewhat self-indulgent and unsurprising.
Pub Date: June 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-86547-915-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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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