An unremarkable memoir, but Disney fans will probably appreciate the insider view.
A close-up of life at Disney World.
Mitchell’s memoir speaks to a popular fantasy of running away to join the workforce at the iconic vacation destination: “All my life, Disney has been a kind of sanctuary for me, a place that felt safe when everything else was going fuzzy.” The California-bred author had worked as a semi-professional skateboarder and freelance photographer when cascading personal crises propelled him toward an impulsive move to the Magic Kingdom, where he quickly found work in photo processing. He was instantly fascinated by the intricacies of Disney culture: hidden messages in park architecture, endless regulations enforced by prissy managers and a high-school–like system of cliques with the employees who play “characters” at the top. “Anyone who believed in fairies could work, live, eat, drink, and date entirely within the Disney matrix without ever leaving Disney property,” he writes. “And from what I could tell, it wasn’t uncommon.” Initially disdained, Mitchell figured out a way to break the rules, becoming known as the “out of character” photographer—Goofy smoking, for instance—which ingratiated him with the snooty inner circle of Cast Members. Soon he committed the ultimate sin, when an attractive co-worker (“Dale”, as in Chip ’n Dale) initiated him into the SOP (Sex on Property) Club: “I was if I could almost see the spirit of Walt shaking his head, sorely disappointed.” Eventually, Mitchell became disillusioned in Orlando, especially after he was turned down for a coveted “face character” role of Aladdin, and learned that his friends and girlfriend at Disney were not the carefree perpetual adolescents they pretended to be. Mitchell effectively captures the inside minutiae of working at Disney, which will surely interest fans, and its surreal effect on the Central Florida landscape. However, the prose is often rambling and heavy on adjectives and clumsy similes.
An unremarkable memoir, but Disney fans will probably appreciate the insider view.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8065-3128-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Citadel/Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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