“Perhaps the fact that I chased so many dreams explains why I ultimately fell from grace.” No, McNall fell from grace—if...
A grim tale of the glamorous life and the fraud that kept it aloft until all came tumbling down, told with an annoying measure of self-serving drivel by wheeler-dealer and ex-jailbird McNall.
Thanks most likely to the hand of Pulitzer-winner D’Antonio (Tour ’72, 2002, etc.), McNall’s story has a polished momentum. Its subject, however, is deeply unappealing: a striver who broke the law to satisfy an urge to sit at the high table of Los Angeles fame. McNall started as a rare coin-dealer, one for whom making money took a back seat to the historical romance of drachmas, and it’s easy to admire his passion for the work. But soon that passion gave way to the greater pleasure of rubbing shoulders with the Hollywood bigwigs who bought his goods. While McNall bemoans their motives—they were interested in coins for the profit, not the poetry—he started to emulate them, buying into movies and thoroughbreds in hopes of big killings, and entering the world of moneyed celebrity rather than the artistry. By the time he purchased a piece of the L.A. Kings hockey team, he was in desperate need of cash to finance various losing investments. So he resorted to false invoicing, false purchase documents, false appraisals—fraud—for which he now serves up such comments as, “I know those kind of dealings might sound shocking. Some of them were illegal. But in the world I inhabited, those kind of favors were as commonplace as baksheesh in Cairo.” He cringed at “the awful, humiliating prospect of failure. I had become a public figure.” Poor baby. By this point, McNall is shedding interested and sympathetic readers like rain off a slicker.
“Perhaps the fact that I chased so many dreams explains why I ultimately fell from grace.” No, McNall fell from grace—if there was any—because he was a crook who got caught. (8 pp. b&w photo insert, not seen)Pub Date: July 9, 2003
ISBN: 0-7868-6864-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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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