A gritty, melancholy memoir leavened by the author’s amiable, engrossing narrative tenor.
The journey of a teenaged theater-school dropout enticed into traveling to Southeast Asia to be a “harem girl.”
Christened “Mariah” by her ballerina birth mother, the author was renamed “Jillian” by her Jewish adoptive parents who acquired her through an illegal “gray-market” transaction. A rocky childhood in suburban New Jersey was followed by a hardscrabble tenure in Manhattan after the author abandoned a New York University education, opting instead for the “proverbial school of life.” Desperate for cash, she exchanged waitressing for stripping, then began escorting for a madam. In the early 1990s, a lucrative offer to “amuse a rich businessman in Singapore” seemed too good to pass up, and it was revealed that the job was really with Prince Jefri (nicknamed “Robin”) of the affluent Brunei royal family. Eager to be relieved of her East Coast “bohemian mantle,” Lauren abandoned a loving boyfriend and her hospitalized father to embrace an “alarming recklessness,” flying to Singapore with only $30, which she spent on a cab to the airport. Together with “Destiny,” another girl chosen from the interviews, Lauren arrived at a high-walled palace, was stripped of her passport and embarked on a life of endless late-night parties populated by beautiful, multicultural and highly competitive women. Crash courses on etiquette, bowing, Muslim customs and basic subservient behavior ensued, all preparing her for the brilliance and ease of an opulent lifestyle with playboy prince Robin. After extending her stay, however, depression, homesickness and harsh reality sent her back to New York, where an unwelcome pregnancy spurred a fruitless search for her birth mother, along with a few shocking twists. Lauren, who considers singer Patti Smith “the barometer of all things cool and right,” is a deft storyteller, imparting equal parts poignant reflection and wisdom into her enlightening book.
A gritty, melancholy memoir leavened by the author’s amiable, engrossing narrative tenor.Pub Date: April 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-452-29631-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
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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