Entertaining in a spontaneous, distracting way. When it ends, though, and Klosterman slams shut the door to his head, most...
A transcontinental road trip mostly along the byways and back roads of Spin magazine writer Klosterman’s own head, resulting in an enjoyable, polyphonic interior monologue.
Early on, you get the warning: this will have all the earmarks of a “reliance on self-indulgent, postmodern self-awareness” as Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, 2003, etc.) fields an assignment to visit the death sites of a number of rock ’n’ rollers, an odyssey that could yield some insight as to why death equals credibility and bestows messianic qualities in the world of rock, or why the greatest career move any musician can make is to stop breathing. And Klosterman does get around to taking a stab at the question—it says more about the fans than the artists—but he is chiefly interested in himself (though, happily, not in love with himself), engaging in extended riffs on his likes and dislikes in music and, most captivatingly, on the pathos of his love life (chimes of High Fidelity here, but readers will know that Klosterman has actually felt the sting, again and again). His brash honesty—“your entire existence as a rock critic is built around the process of reviewing your mail”—is shown both by an easeful descriptive talent as he drives from town to town, seeking the last place Duane Allman and Lynyrd Skynyrd, Kurt Cobain and Holly-Valens-Bopper saw the light of day, and by slices of dark humor (as when his sister accidentally hit a cow with her car “and the old sleepy-eyed heifer went down like Frazier getting tagged by Foreman”). He can also be exasperatingly logorrheic, but road-trippers are on a ramble, after all.
Entertaining in a spontaneous, distracting way. When it ends, though, and Klosterman slams shut the door to his head, most of what went before melts into air.Pub Date: July 19, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6445-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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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