Intriguing midpoint autobiography sure to rouse curiosity about what the next half has in store.
Chester's go-ahead-and-laugh debut memoir shows a difficult adolescence evolving into a successful independent-film career.
The author reflects on his youth with a bleak, steady wryness. His family is standard-issue dysfunctional: Grandma’s comradely advice includes, “It's much worse to get hit in the face with your own shit than with someone else’s. Remember that”; while Mom offers, “I hope there's sex in heaven ’cause I sure do like it!” Growing up in this hapless, hopeless, yet oddly secure environment, Chester describes himself as “a socially unskilled, constipated, Christian gay child,” painfully shy and the class joke. Things can't get worse, it seems, until he begins showing symptoms of Long-Face Syndrome, a genetic disorder that tests even Chester's capacity for black humor. Painful and humiliating, endless surgery gives him a new face, and his experience out there on the margin of things presumably gave him the ability to see the comedy in his predicament that distinguishes his recollections—while asides like “the only thing better than winning in this life is proving people wrong” hint at a bilious undercurrent. Out of these ruins an actor is born, well versed in nuances and the oblique. Chester calls up choice moments in his rise as a performer, remembering an early gig at which his parents “sat quietly as their only son sang songs about eating ass.” On the politics of being openly gay in Hollywood, he comments of belatedly candid celebrities that “coming out once you have a mansion and a Range Rover isn't really the same as putting your ass on the line from the get-go,” and notes the weirdness of losing gay roles to straight actors because he’s “not gay enough” or because the people at home need to know it’s “all just pretend.”
Intriguing midpoint autobiography sure to rouse curiosity about what the next half has in store.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-28713-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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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