A mildly provocative, gloriously eccentric autobiography told through the aging eyes of a man who unapologetically adores...
An affable octogenarian reflects on the spicier snippets of his sex life.
“I amaze myself for being able to recall minute details of events of decades ago,” writes the 88-year-old author in this unconventional collection of appealing, inoffensive vignettes on life and sex. The son of a Hungarian soldier from Transylvania who fought for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Halmay (Ghost Town, 2013, etc.) was raised in the company of comely maids, each contributing to his carnal education and the loss of his virginity. From his youth in Toronto as a randy teenager, the author writes of being helplessly enamored by women and of becoming fascinated by their beauty and “lack of logic.” A lover of humorous females, he admits that his ideal mate would be actress Lisa Kudrow, whom he describes as “physically attractive but who is intrinsically funny and I find that devastating.” He writes floridly of a particularly zesty, early relationship at 19 with a voluptuous seductress named “Kiki,” then recounts torrid near-miss encounters stifled by office-cleaning women, steamy nights of drunken fumbling, a mother and daughter harboring very fluid views of sex, and an amorous yet disastrously irresponsible affair with a married woman. The longest (and least sensual) recollection in this memoir is a meandering memory encapsulating the dissolution of his 30-year marriage and an unusual friendship with an outspoken divorcée. Though his tale is uneven in theme and tone, Halmay emerges as a palpably passionate raconteur, showing an endless fascination with human nature and reliably interjecting a surplus of side banter into the erotic encounters that tickled much of his youth. The author’s infectious charm and nonchalant sense of humor shine most when he sticks to the absurdities of sex, even as his honest appraisals of both gay and straight marriage, sexual compulsion, and organized religion offer refreshing respites. Consistently frank, Halmay concludes his potent history with rather uneventful homosexual experiences and a poignant story of a friend who died too soon. Suffused with sage wisdom and quirks galore, Halmay implores readers to simply yield to life’s ebb and flow because “taking seriously the insanity of life tends to destroy us bit by bit.”
A mildly provocative, gloriously eccentric autobiography told through the aging eyes of a man who unapologetically adores the charms and wonders of women.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Veni Vici Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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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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