“A pet peeve of mine is with people who give backhanded compliments.” So: The best memoir and etiquette guide manqué we have...
Fox News commentator Perino, co-host of The Five, spreads sunshine in a book from which even Fox News haters could extract some useful nuggets.
Before the hackles rise, let it be known that we’re violating one of the no-no’s she advances in this combination of memoir and update of Miss Manners for our time: Instead of saying, “I hated everything about the Bush Administration, but I like you,” she counsels, we should say, “You were a good press secretary.” Yes: She’s that Dana Perino, still selling a Bush-Cheney agenda while lamenting the incivility and partisan divisions of Washington: “We’ve gone from being the confident leader of the free world to bickering about every living thing under the sun.” In her favor, she does allow that Republicans are sharper-tongued and meaner to each other than Democrats are to them—but, she adds brightly, “That’s okay—it makes us smarter and better at what we do.” Ever political, Perino would seem to want it both ways, though, to her credit, her relentless cheerfulness will make readers wish that politicians of every bent were just a little kinder to each other. And besides, she notes, the left indulges in name-calling, too. Probably, the left would do even more, and Harry Reid would be meaner than he is, had it a machine the like of Fox News, but that’s another matter for another day. For the time being, and again to her credit, the author allows that it’s a fair criticism to say that she’s part of the problem—“or if not me specifically,” she amends, “then cable news and talk radio.”
“A pet peeve of mine is with people who give backhanded compliments.” So: The best memoir and etiquette guide manqué we have by “the first and only Republican woman” to serve as White House press secretary. Now be nice.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-8490-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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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