A brisk and often funny style and a talent for catching his subjects off-guard with unexpected questions make for...
Two decades of celebrity profiles for Esquire, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and other magazines.
Celebrity worship is a two-sided thing. The media delight in making celebrities into larger-than-life figures, but it finds as much, if not more, enjoyment in cutting them down to size, demonstrating that for all their fabulousness, stars are just as prone to selfishness, irresponsibility, or stupidity as anyone else—though admittedly on a bigger scale than the rest of us. People in search of major dirt may find Zehme’s subtitle somewhat misleading, for while many of his profiles are undeniably comic, few major indiscretions are detailed. Indeed, for the most part, the author takes an affectionate, even protective attitude toward his subjects, though it’s couched in a breezily irreverent style that deflects any charges of outright sycophancy. He may poke gentle fun (carefully noting the length of the pauses in his interview with the notoriously evasive Warren Beatty, for instance), but on the whole he’s sympathetic. Thus we find Hugh Hefner sounding like a moony teenager as he searches for a new “special lady” after his divorce; Woody Allen—his own indiscretions by then a matter of public record—bemoaning his court-ordered estrangement from his and Mia Farrow’s children; Madonna dodging paparazzi in the wake of her breakup with Sean Penn; and so on. One of the few occasions when Zehme becomes genuinely critical is in a series of articles on the behind-the-scenes scheming that resulted in Jay Leno rather than David Letterman inheriting The Tonight Show from Johnny Carson, but even there he assigns the blame primarily to Leno’s agent and the suits at NBC.
A brisk and often funny style and a talent for catching his subjects off-guard with unexpected questions make for interesting glimpses of the real people behind their public personae.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-33374-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Delta
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
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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