Day is delightfully good company and has an interesting story to tell, but a richer work would have made more room for a...
Actress Day, best known for her “geek goddess” roles in such nerd-culture touchstones as the Web series The Guild and various Joss Whedon projects, recounts her unusual upbringing and the neuroses-strewn path that led to her obsessions with fantasy, science fiction, gaming, and online communities.
Diffidently home schooled by an eccentric, indulgent mother, the author and her brother were largely left to pursue their particular passions in an environment of social isolation. Day responded by immersing herself in the imaginative worlds of escapist genre fiction and video games, forging communities of like-minded introverts over the nascent World Wide Web—when she was not busy excelling at advanced mathematics and the violin, achievements that would land her in college at an age years younger than her peers, further exacerbating her social awkwardness. Day writes charmingly of her cluelessness and determination throughout her career, but there is a dark undercurrent to her drive to succeed, no matter how arbitrary the reward. From “leveling up” in an online game to maintaining a perfect (and perfectly useless, post-graduation) GPA, Day has always pursued her goals with a manic focus seemingly driven entirely by fear and panicky self-doubt. This compulsive nature led to addiction problems, interpersonal chaos, and extended periods of depression. The author’s feelings about her prominent role in the misogyny-drenched “Gamergate” scandal, which she reveals here with raw anger and hurt simmering beneath her breezy, kooky gal patter, suggest a painful ambivalence about the costs and rewards of the indoor, fantastical, virtual life—a fascinating thread that is too glancingly addressed throughout the book.
Day is delightfully good company and has an interesting story to tell, but a richer work would have made more room for a consideration of the darker aspects of geek culture.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8565-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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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