Martin seldom goes deep, but the arc of growing self-awareness lends the story both gravity and an odd appeal.
A portrait of the artist as a moody teen.
“When someone suggested I was cool,” writes Martin (Mickey, 2016, etc.) by way of introduction, “I couldn’t help but think, What the fuck is your problem?” It’s a good organizing question as, at only 30, the author takes a hard look at her youth, chronicling the tumult and hardship that modern American life visits on the young, thanks mostly to the regrettable behavior of grown-ups who are scarcely grown themselves: "Seth and my mom fought a lot. Yelling and stomping around, mostly, but sometimes the fights became physically aggressive, and they would throw things or grab each other or make physical threats.” Readers might rightly be flummoxed, in any event, at a book that opens with a confession to having a first sexual experience at the age of 6, courtesy of a terrible slasher/horror film: “I attributed it to Chucky,” Martin writes matter-of-factly, “the evil sentient doll.” The author recounts a life alternately spent alone in her bedroom, making mix tapes and collages (“I knew I had something to say, but I didn’t trust myself to find the right way to say it yet”), and being wistfully, self-doubtfully in love with boys who didn’t know she existed. In other words, it’s the sort of thing with which any sensitive reader who has suffered through adolescence will feel sympathetic recognition. The story levels off in early adulthood, with still more confusions and failings and clumsy moments: “I mostly wanted to eat Jeppe’s burger, because Ian had ordered his with mayonnaise and I hated mayonnaise, but I couldn’t pass up the thrill of eating from two men’s burgers at the same time.” That episode ends on a note of furious discovery that is unexpected but entirely appropriate.
Martin seldom goes deep, but the arc of growing self-awareness lends the story both gravity and an odd appeal.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59376-677-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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