Remarkably honest. There is something both sad and deeply satisfying about watching this legendary mistress of emotional...
The famously sexually open memoirist grapples with jealousy.
In her bestselling memoir (The Sexual Life of Catherine M, 2002), Paris art critic Millet shocked the world with her unapologetically candid descriptions of an extravagant sex life with no boundaries and, seemingly, no consequences. After losing her virginity at 18, she immediately engaged in a weeklong bacchanalia of group sex. As an adult, she moved between long-term partners, but was consistently involved in sexual relationships with other people. She eventually ended up in a committed but open marriage to a fellow critic named Jacques. Soon after, however, Millet found in Jacques’ study a series of letters and photographs indicating that he was having an emotional, as well as physical, affair with another woman. Just as with her sexual life, Millet discusses her jealousy of this woman in a detached, intellectual tone, laying it out nakedly with no sense of embarrassment—though with some personal shock at the circumstances, as if her openness toward sexual pleasure ought to have left her immune to jealousy. To cope, the author traveled through Europe, obsessing about the details of the affair, calling Jacques in various states of emotional distress and at times retreating totally within herself. There are particular moments of poignant pain—when she became physically sick, for example, and had no recollection of it until Jacques pointed it out—but for most of the book her grief is stunningly relatable, even ordinary. In the end, she clawed her way back to trusting Jacques, though the experience left a distinct mark on her spirit.
Remarkably honest. There is something both sad and deeply satisfying about watching this legendary mistress of emotional bravado crumble.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1915-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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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