A memoir/essay collection of consistently heartfelt and enlightening morsels of humanity.
Creatively dispatched memories from a noted essayist and fiction writer.
In his first foray into nonfiction, novelist Skibell (A Curable Romantic, 2010, etc.) touches on themes of identity, parental mortality, Judaism, and all of the foibles encountered within a close-knit lineage. The bonds of family figure greatly in these fondly depicted stories. In the resonant title piece, the first musical instrument the author’s father, a family businessman, bought him as a youngster—a Fender guitar—incites a “laughably Freudian” correlation to another guitar his father would later purchase as well as yet another he bought to perpetuate his father’s memory. Elsewhere, the author details his clumsy navigation around female students at college as a self-described “sexual maladroit” who dropped out of graduate school and dated a woman haunted by ghosts, a supernatural concept that he, then 23, mocked and arrogantly debunked with theoretical gibberish. Throughout the collection, Skibell makes plenty of room for humor. Though his family scoffed at his interest in learning the universal language Esperanto, he persevered “like a postman through the snow and the sleet and the gloom of their derision” only to hilariously turn the tables on a telemarketer by requesting they sponsor his classes. Another entry finds the author getting sweet comeuppance on a cousin who posted a negative review of his second novel online. The lengthier essays detail Skibell’s trials through his years struggling as a screenwriter in Hollywood and the histrionic heritage of his father’s cousin Tiger. In the closing essay, the author reflects on the occupational hazards of being a published author and the revelations that can occur after listening to a complete stranger’s tale of woe. Colorful and endearing, the book will appeal to readers who appreciate Augusten Burroughs–style, real-life anecdotal ponderings focused on familial ties and how life’s eternal cycle of enchantment and disillusionment somehow sustains us.
A memoir/essay collection of consistently heartfelt and enlightening morsels of humanity.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-56512-930-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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PROFILES
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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