The author’s journey is not without its wisdom but too often relies on anecdotes and cameos to keep it afloat.
Longtime doyen of celebrity media, Sessums (Mississippi Sissy, 2007) reflects on how his wild years of partying while working as a journalist left him spiritually vacant.
The author follows up his first best-selling memoir about the allure of pop culture growing up in Mississippi by charting the next chapter of his life as a media debutante in New York and the seduction of celebrity that he found all around him. Beginning his career as a journalist at Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine before landing at Vanity Fair, Sessums notably covered Michael J. Fox, Madonna and Courtney Love. However, despite his professional success and hobnobbing with the cultural elite, the author complains of chronic loneliness. Desperately searching for closure and an outlet for his grief, he turned to drug use and sexual profligacy. His self-destructiveness, however, is not an easy sympathy case due to his simultaneously self-pitying and aggrandizing attitude. For instance, can Sessums truly lay claim to his boastful reputation as being “known as a writer uninhibited by fame”? He’s interviewed and written about stars, but, as he admits, he remained “outside the frame of fame” and, at best, was a “heightened acquaintance” of his subjects. There’s an undeniable air of self-importance to all memoirs, but Sessums fully exploits this characteristic, inflating his social position for bragging rights while downplaying it to display his manufactured vulnerability. Sessums’ likening of a New Year’s party as “packed as a well-edited paragraph at The New Yorker” perfectly captures the tone of his narrative: droll and unapologetically smug. He is genuine, though, as he chronicles his descent into drug and sex addiction, not to mention the news that he is HIV positive. Sessums dramatically details hitting bottom, but he prevails, closing the loop on his redemption story—but not without the fortuitous help of his friends. Turns out he wasn’t so alone.
The author’s journey is not without its wisdom but too often relies on anecdotes and cameos to keep it afloat.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-59838-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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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