Brennan-Jobs benefits from her father’s story, but her prose doesn’t require his spotlight to shine.
An epic, sharp coming-of-age story from the daughter of Steve Jobs.
It’s rare to find a memoir from a celebrity’s child in which the writing is equal to—or exceeds—the parent’s reputation, but that is the case with Brennan-Jobs’ debut. The author engagingly packs in every detail of her life, including her seemingly innocuous conception by Jobs and artist Chrisann Brennan, her father’s paternity denial, their rocky reconciliation, and Jobs’ ultimate rejection and silence. In a lesser writer’s hands, the narrative could have devolved into literary revenge. Instead, Brennan-Jobs offers a stunningly beautiful study of parenting that just so happens to include the co-founder of Apple. With a background in journalism, she skillfully and poignantly navigates her formative years, revealing the emotional wounds that parents can often visit upon their children. From Jobs’ refusal to pay for her college to his ongoing refutation that his first personal computer, the Apple Lisa, was named for her, she describes a master of mental and emotional manipulation: “ ‘Well, then, who was it named after?’ ‘An old girlfriend,’ he said, looking off into the distance, as if remembering. Wistful. It was this dreamy quality that made me believe he was telling the truth, because otherwise it was quite an act….I had a strange feeling in my stomach…[and was] starting to believe I was calibrated wrong.” Not until Jobs was on his deathbed did he finally admit to his daughter that the Apple Lisa was named after her. But why lie? Why purposely hurt your child and then, a moment later, display enormous affection? Those are some of the questions the author wrestles with as she examines her youth. Of course, the book also includes enough celebrity gossip to please tabloid lovers, but this is not a tell-all; it’s an exquisitely rendered story of family, love, and identity.
Brennan-Jobs benefits from her father’s story, but her prose doesn’t require his spotlight to shine.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2823-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
PERSPECTIVES
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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