A fascinating memoir by a 21st-century original.
How does a fictional character write a real memoir? Very, very well.
Most readers who are active on social media are aware of Duchess Goldblatt, the acerbic yet warmhearted doyenne of Twitter, represented by a Frans Hals portrait of an elderly woman with a stiff muff around her neck. Over the years, she’s dispensed witticisms and advice to her 24,000-plus followers, many of them writers, without giving away any clues about the person behind the persona. When she finally met her No. 1 fan, Lyle Lovett (it’s a long story), he was shocked that she wasn’t "a little old lady or a gay man!” Now, Duchess Goldblatt’s admirers can get to know her still-anonymous creator, and perhaps the biggest surprise in this striking memoir is the fact that Duchess is a name (taken from a friend’s dog), not a title, though no doubt everyone will keep calling her “Your Grace.” The author created Duchess during a terrible time: She'd lost her job, her husband had left her, and she was tormented by the part-time separation from her young son. Duchess was a way for her to lurk online, but she soon found herself carefully crafting posts, responding to everyone who wrote to her, and finding solace in the community she’d created. The book is prismatic, moving among the author’s difficult childhood, the years after her divorce, and her growing relationships with people Duchess had befriended—only a few of whom, including Lovett, have ever met her. She wrestles with the questions of whether she and Duchess are two separate people and how Duchess makes friends so easily when she herself feels almost friendless. Lovett’s manager called what she’s doing “collaborative performance art,” and that’s an apt term for it; together with Duchess’ followers, she’s created a long-term fever dream of humor, compassion, wordplay, and dog photos.
A fascinating memoir by a 21st-century original.Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-358-21677-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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
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