Still a hustler, still a salesman—and also a hell of a writer.
After serving time in federal minimum-security prison for stock fraud, money laundering and other financial crimes, Belfort offers another coarse, lively text as a companion to The Wolf of Wall Street (2007).
That unsavory bestseller chronicled the rise of a cocky thief who actually operated a bucket shop in Long Island, not lower Manhattan. This is about his fall. It’s also about money and sex, featuring erotic histrionics and rancid uxorious relations. The language is still nasty, the braggadocio intact. No lovable scamp, Belfort remains cunning and vainglorious, frequently mentioning the cost of his clothing and his furniture, sneering at the cheap shoes and Bic lighters of his federal captors. After all, he once had the mansions, the yacht, the money. But he confessed and became a cooperating informant. He ratted on friends and thieving comrades. He wore a wire. His new memoir is graphic, at once lowdown and over-the-top. Included is the collapse of his second marriage to “the Duchess of Bay Ridge,” a classic trophy wife he had bugged for his own reasons. He got engaged to Miss Soviet Union. He dallied with a “self-proclaimed Jewish blow-job queen” and dabbled in what he calls “model-mongering.” He jumped bail and broke his cooperation agreement by taking an ill-fated trip to Atlantic City with an underage “model.” Withal, his love for his two children remained. In reward for his cooperation he served less than two years. In the Big House he bunked with Tommy Chong, who guided him in the craft of authorship. Chong, whose sincere, flaky memoir (The I Chong, 2006) is half as long as his student’s, apparently forgot to impart the rule of Less is More.
Still a hustler, still a salesman—and also a hell of a writer.Pub Date: March 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-553-80704-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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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