Straight from the confessional—one hopes the writing was cathartic, because it’s awfully painful reading.
Former TV-show creator and producer Barris (Who Killed Art Deco?, 2009, etc.) offers “snapshots” of his daughter’s doomed life.
Della Barris died at the age of 36, undone by alcoholism and drug addiction. She had been indulging, as far as the author knows, since she was 11. It may have been a genetic problem, but Barris is the first to admit that he could have done a lot more to nurture his daughter. The author is unforgiving in his depiction of his and Della’s mother’s parenting—they were immature, self-involved and negligent, he writes. He believes their divorce shattered something in the young Della, and it certainly marks the beginning of his failure as a father. Della was bounced around from school to school, continent to continent, until she landed with her father, at his suggestion. He calls her mean, deceitful and duplicitous, and a “vicious” blackmailer when it came to his girlfriends. “I found the responsibility of caring for my daughter loathsome,” he writes, and one attention-calling episode after another finds him whining, “I didn’t know what to do about it.” Nor did he seek much advice, least of all from Della. The author abandoned her at age 16 to a trust account. After years of ill will, there was a rapprochement, but by then Della was a full-blown, HIV-positive addict, stealing from friends and prostituting herself.
Straight from the confessional—one hopes the writing was cathartic, because it’s awfully painful reading.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-6799-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
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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