A boozy holler of a book, with a great soundtrack.
The Dartmouth frat escapades of the National Lampoon writer whose experiences inspired the film Animal House.
The Alpha Delta Phi house at Dartmouth was called “Animal House” for a number of reasons, the most famous of which involved some members who were haplessly chasing a chicken around the yard (eager to kill it for dinner), only to be brought up short when an upperclassman (known as “The Man”) plugged the chicken with a .45 slug from his upstairs room. Unfortunately for readers of Miller's biography about his sophomore Dartmouth year in 1960 at the AD house, nothing quite that eventful happens—it's action-packed but mostly of the binge-drinking, puking, pissing and trying-to-get-laid variety. Miller was a smart-ass gentile from the Long Island suburbs with a yen for girls, obscure rock 45s and Yiddish slang who found himself at home with the ADs, who treasured drinking and the bestowing of nicknames (Miller's is “Pinto”). The author writes that what “cartoon characters and AD brothers had in common was their exuberance,” a truism he proves time and again throughout these raucous, bleary pages where schoolwork is but a vague concern and the unceasing bacchanal is everything. Written in a juvenile, slangy rush, Miller's book has energy to spare. The stories are related mostly in streams of obscene dialogue and are focused on activities centered either immediately above or below the waist. There's a time limit on such behavior, of course, given the ADs' “amused cynicism about all human activity [and] Dadaistic displays of sociopathic behavior in public spaces,” and the attraction begins to pall at about the halfway point, not long after Miller/Pinto starts referring to himself in the third person. For Animal House completists, be assured, one can find here most of the film's raw elements, from the road trip, the band playing “Shout!” and even the Dean's decision to put the house on an unprecedented “triple warning.”
A boozy holler of a book, with a great soundtrack.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-316-05701-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
