Were it not for the risqué subject matter and the absence of a blue roadster, this piffle might well be a Nancy Drew called...
National Book Award–winner Ball (Slaves in the Family, 1998) returns with a silly, salacious story of sexual identity and interracial marriage.
A young Englishman living in Charleston, South Carolina, Gordon Hall in the late 1960s underwent sex-change surgery, became Dawn Hall, married a black man named John-Paul Simmons, then claimed she was pregnant and subsequently produced a baby named Natasha she said she’d delivered in 1971. Dawn Simmons published some celebrity biographies (Princess Margaret, Lady Bird Johnson) and a memoir; for a while she enjoyed a sordid sort of tabloid celebrity. She died, virtually unknown, in 2000. As Gordon Hall, he had ingratiated himself with Isabel Whitney and inherited from her a sizable sum (perhaps as much as a million dollars), then moved to Charleston to set himself up as an antiques dealer and subsequently to become the woman he said he always had been. Gradually the money vanished. For some unimaginable reason, author Ball decided this was a story worth his talents and so traveled all over America and England to interview people who knew Simmons and to stand at the sacred shrines of his/her nativity, childhood, youth, and so on. The author writes of this with enormous gravity, as if he were investigating the identity of Shakespeare or identifying pieces of the True Cross, but his only real questions are: What plumbing did Simmons have? (Male.) Where did the baby come from? (She bought it.) The writing is banal by every measure. Hall offers formulaic head-to-toe descriptions of every person he interviews, he tries to leave the reader hanging at the end of each chapter, and he fashions sentences that seem lifted from bad YA mysteries (“I had a hunch the place might hold some clues”).
Were it not for the risqué subject matter and the absence of a blue roadster, this piffle might well be a Nancy Drew called The Mystery of the Curious Plumbing. (45 b&w photos)Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-3560-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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