Well known for his antic mysteries, freethinking, colorful Friedman (The Prisoner of Vandam Street, 2004, etc.) offers a Texan’s view of life and other oddments.
Friedman’s short, good-and-warped journalistic pieces are intended as survival tools, a way of holding on to the good hand and playing a poor one well. In the belief that “humor always sails dangerously close to the truth,” he takes broad comic swipes at all things Texan. These include people who go to their pet’s vet for their own illnesses, pickup-truck decorations such as “a window sticker of a cowboy kneeling at the foot of a cross, head bowed, hat in hand,” a state version of the Ten Commandments, including “Honor thy styling gel,” and those who proudly proclaim that the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame sports a petrified buffalo hairball. Friedman is equally broad in his friendships; few others can count both George W. Bush and Molly Ivins as chums. Declaring his candidacy for governor of Texas, Friedman acknowledges that he has less political experience than his opponents, but reassures voters, “Trust me, I’m a Jew. I’ll hire good people.” Though Texas launches many of his visions, the author also happily explores such topics as why Eagle Scouts are a breeding ground for future mass murderers, why seeking out Saddam Hussein’s tailor in London is almost as special as meeting Gandhi’s barber and why friendship transcends politics: “I feel close to the Bush family in the same way that I feel close to the Willie Nelson family and the Charles Manson family.” The one extended piece here is a great profile of Nelson on tour. Friedman knows and likes the singer enough to repeatedly poke him in the eye, describing Nelson’s trademark headgear, for instance, as “a bandana that has been carbon-dated and found to be slightly older than the shroud of Turin.”
Kinky for sure, and twisted in a sentimental, good-spirited way. (Cartoons by John Callahan)Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-33154-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
Categories: HISTORY | UNITED STATES | GENERAL HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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