A pocket-sized pick-me-up for fans and dreamers.
Country music’s spunky doyenne presents an inspirational, feel-good stocking stuffer.
Parton channels her years of down-home sensibilities and showbiz wisdom to fans needing a life-affirming pep talk, expanding on material delivered during a commencement speech highlighting what she considers to be the eternal rewards of dreaming, learning and caring. She fondly, if fleetingly, reminisces on being raised with 11 other siblings in a “shack at the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains” and touches on her school days distracted by boys, being spoon-fed Bible chapters and rebelliously applying makeup even after being warned that it was “sinful.” Parton gets personal when writing of her 46-year marriage to Carl Dean and discusses what were initially considered as ill-conceived decisions to leave The Porter Wagoner Show to branch out into pop music then conceptualize the Dollywood theme park (she admits to knowing little about its daily operations). At the heart of Parton’s brief book are positive empowerment and a refreshing work ethic that support her travel-heavy livelihood singing, acting and fulfilling philanthropic endeavors like the Dollywood Foundation and the Imagination Library, which delivers free books to children. The author credits her boundless energy level to a minimalistic need for sleep (though she takes power naps) and true happiness surrounded by friends, family and a blessed life. Parton’s kooky, boobcentric sense of humor gels nicely with pages of song lyrics, anecdotes and countrified witticisms (“I look so totally artificial, but am so totally real”).
A pocket-sized pick-me-up for fans and dreamers.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-16248-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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