Bailey gives no evidence of his or his brother’s splendid plans, only decades of depression, isolation and insidious...
An award-winning biographer reveals his troubled past.
National Book Critics Circle Award winner Bailey (Creative Writing/Old Dominion Univ.; Farther & Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson, 2013, etc.) justifies his attraction to alcoholic subjects (John Cheever, Richard Yates, Charles Jackson) in this bleak, repetitious memoir. Bailey’s father was Oklahoma’s assistant attorney general, his mother, a hard drinker trying to revive, in the Midwest, her bohemian Greenwich Village youth. Bailey and his older brother, Scott, became heavy drinkers in high school, even before their parents divorced, an event that disrupted an already strained family. Scott’s problems, though, went beyond drunkenness: At one point, a psychiatrist diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic, a diagnosis that Bailey rejects—though he offers no other explanation for his brother’s erratic behavior, grandiose riffs, addictions, violence and ultimate suicide. Bailey chronicles Scott’s descent, but also notes that he, too, was an alcoholic. Scott, however, supplemented alcohol with various other drugs, including heroin. Their frustrated parents sometimes lashed out angrily, sometimes coddled their troubled sons. “Scott’s not as bad as you think. It’s not all black and white,” his mother told Bailey after Scott threatened to kill her. “There’s a little gray!” Some of Scott’s escapades seem like plots from a Cheever story: Scott “liked being in other people’s houses,” sneaking in during the night and staying for hours; in summer, he would “skulk around the suburbs,” bolting into family barbecues, stabbing meat and running off with it. The title of this memoir comes from a song Scott liked, Roy Clark’s 1969 “Yesterday When I was Young”: “…The thousand dreams I dreamed, the splendid things I planned/ I always built to last on weak and shifting sand.”
Bailey gives no evidence of his or his brother’s splendid plans, only decades of depression, isolation and insidious self-absorption.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-393-23957-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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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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