An entertaining miscellany by a sharp-eyed observer.
A self-described “goofball” cheerfully reflects on life.
Taking up from where she left off in her last essay collection, Mastromonaco (Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?, 2017), Barack Obama’s former White House deputy chief of staff for operations, gathers essays, random thoughts, and interviews that add up to a merry gloss on politics, campaign work for John Kerry and Obama, her stint in the White House, dating (a guy who collected Beanie Babies, for example) and breaking up, watching Friends and Sex and the City, the health problem—irritable bowel syndrome—she wrote about in the previous book, how social media has changed politics, and many other topics, including Donald Trump. Although she was scolded by Amazon reviewers for TMI, she can’t help but return to the IBS theme, warning readers who may not “appreciate knowing the details of strangers’ gastrointestinal lives” to skip to her essay on getting her period. “I’m a forty-two-year-old woman with the diet of a picky seven-year-old and the bathroom habits of a seventy-two-year-old. What can I do but talk about it?” She also discusses her long, initially futile search to find comfortable underwear, which ended, happily, with “Gap stretch-cotton hipsters, size large.” The essays are interspersed with lists: favorite songs, things you should never say to your boss, what’s in her suitcase; and interviews with Susan Rice, Monica Lewinsky (a dear friend), Dan Pfeiffer (her Platonic Life Partner), and Chelsea Handler. The brief conversations are as frothy as the essays. Pfeiffer tells her that “the key to any lifelong friendship/platonic partnership is trust.” Rice encourages young women to “do what you are passionate about.” Mastromonaco surely has followed that advice, and in looking back on her career, she reflects thoughtfully on her decision not to have a child. Most pieces are funny and many, insightful. “If I’ve learned anything in my life,” she writes, “it’s that the line between nonsense and wisdom is very thin.”
An entertaining miscellany by a sharp-eyed observer.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5387-3155-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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
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