Lunch fans will enjoy her unleashed musings and the healthy rage that abound in these fierce essays.
In her latest, singer, writer, and performer Lunch (The Need to Feed: Recipes for Developing a Healthy Obsession With Deeply Satisfying Foods, 2012, etc.) offers her unique blend of raw humor and uncompromising observations.
Buoyed by indignant anger and outrage, these cultural critiques function best when viewed as performance pieces that vary between scathing indictments and rambling rants. Maintaining a deliberate defiance in tone and style, the author covers broad topics, from wildly intimate experiences to coarse opinions and razor-sharp social insights. As usual, Lunch holds nothing back, providing rebellious, raunchy personal stories, scorching perspectives on the notion of mandatory motherhood, a purging glimpse at the nightmare of insomnia, and other themes. Amid these punchy personal revelations, the author layers honed essays with a broader scope. The topics include a reflective interview with Hubert Selby Jr., an in-depth profile of poet Herbert Huncke (“short shift hustler, petty thief, con artist, convicted felon, parasitic hustler, lifelong junkie…whose collected memoirs, beautifully rendered, are infused with heartbreaking detours, detailing life lived to the extreme”), a gritty history of No Wave in New York, and a blistering criticism of recent environmental degradation, pollution, and political abuses of power for economic gains. In the ambitious “Slobathon,” Lunch tackles fashion trends and the commodification of style from James Dean to the death of glam and beyond. Pulling attention to corporate greed and consumer accountability, this explosive essay seethes with the kind of urgency that reflects Lunch at her strongest. Together, these reactions to consumerism, global economic exploitation, hypocrisy, militarism, environmental destruction, and other social failures of modern American society are fervent, bordering on virulent. Consistent with her other work, the author’s voice may be faulted as uneven but never tamed; it’s not a book for the easily offended or faint of heart.
Lunch fans will enjoy her unleashed musings and the healthy rage that abound in these fierce essays.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-60980-943-0
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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
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