A uniquely talented writer and performer offers up an unexpectedly uncommon approach to autobiographical writing.
Tough times spur a popular stand-up comedian and actor to dive deep into her own inimitable psyche.
In Slate’s (Marcel the Shell With Shoes On: Things About Me, 2011) intriguing inner world, raindrops are “wet water bloops” that fall unexpectedly from the sky, and brassieres are “cotton cup bags” that respectable ladies are obliged to don before heading out to dinner. The use of deconstructed language allows the author to move beyond the banal and replace it with something that more closely approximates her singular experience of being alive. Whether joyous or sad, Slate’s personal journey hasn’t always been lighthearted. Indeed, the author feels moved to describe herself as “dying” on multiple occasions throughout her life. She is concerned with many other things, as well, including the nature of lovelorn ghosts and the ethereal goodness of dogs. Underneath the gauzy, shimmering scaffolding, however, is an all-too-universal story about heartbreak, depression, and a failed marriage: “One man was gone from my life just about the time that another man pig-snorted his way into the presidency….I didn’t know how or why to give myself small pleasures.” Through it all, she has found solace in a circle of good friends and the redemptive powers of a neat house and an incredible garden. Slate seems to fit so comfortably inside the poetic realms of her impressive imagination that she has no need to abandon them, not even when she is rebuking the pernicious ugliness of male patriarchy, another element that has heavily impacted her life. In one particularly powerful interlude, the author achieves biblical grandeur, envisioning herself ripping out the ancient evil root and stem. “I take one last good look at that poison pod and I just go ahead and fling it,” she writes. “I fling that pod back into the gloomy section of outer space that is for bad gods with sickly and sour spirits.”
A uniquely talented writer and performer offers up an unexpectedly uncommon approach to autobiographical writing.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-48534-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2019
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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