A fluffy diversion for celebrity-obsessed readers.
A tale of Kardashian Inc.
If John Oliver devoted a show to the famous family, it might share a bit of the snark and incredulity of this report from Oppenheimer (RFK, Jr.: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Dark Side of the Dream, 2015, etc.), a prolific author of unauthorized biographies. Readers looking for gossip about the Kardashians’ present lives may be left wanting, but for lovers of 1980s prime-time drama, the author delivers with the origin story of the infamous crew. Anyone who has wondered how this “dysfunctional family with little to no discernable talent besides self-promotion” became a cultural phenomenon will enjoy Oppenheimer’s take. The author is clearly one of the unconverted, and the book feels like a companion volume to Kris Jenner’s 2011 memoir, an effort to annotate and correct the matriarch's own embellished account. He fills in the gaps and calls out Kris’ version as we learn about the doomed first husband, Robert Kardashian, second husband, (formerly) Bruce Jenner, as well as Kris’ climb to the top of Beverly Hills society. Robert, famous for his involvement in the O.J. Simpson trial, gets the kindest treatment here, with a close second going to third-born Khloe Kardashian. She appears as a child whose paternity might be suspect but whose innocence and guilelessness set her apart—at least to Oppenheimer—from the rest of the family. By far the most entertaining aspect, however, is the author’s blatant incredulousness at the history Kris wrote herself. He’s not buying it, quoting her memoir with eyes clearly rolled, featuring such caveats as “she actually avowed” and “suggesting…that she possessed a religious leaning.” The book concludes with an overview of the current clan’s net worth and doings as well as a chilling prediction of what’s next for the ever ambitious Kris Kardashian Jenner: a run for the White House and the ultimate ratings grab.
A fluffy diversion for celebrity-obsessed readers.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-08714-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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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