Energized by Karr’s sharp wit, this tale of Texas adolescence reads like a fast-paced novel. More importantly, her...
Fans of Karr’s award-winning The Liars’ Club (1995) will not be disappointed by this feisty, funny, and tender memoir of a drug-ridden coming of age in Leechfield, her Texas hometown.
The author’s much-married mother, bemused father, and angry sister Lecia are all still in place; new characters include surfers who nod out at the beach every weekend, the sweet college boy who was her first lover, and a bouquet of remarkable girlfriends, unlikely blooms among Leechfield’s insular population. Karr’s strange family has pushed her to the social outskirts, and she buries herself in books and fantasies. But they don’t stave off prepubescent self-consciousness, like the terrible shame of the huge pimple on her forehead exposed to her sixth-grade crush, or the pain when her best friend moves on to another best friend, or the humiliation that her first real date is with the town’s ranking dweeb, who is also a proselytizing Mormon. Karr vividly captures those moments that are so important to a girl growing up, and explains why they are important. She candidly depicts a muffed eighth-grade suicide attempt and high-school years passed in a blur of drugs (the time is the late 1960s and early ’70s) as she tried to escape the paralyzing monotony and psychic brutality of life in Leechfield. Accelerating substance abuse leads to arrest and a horrendous, acid-laced night at Effie’s Go-Go bar, whose terrifying patrons inspire Karr to one of those chemically assisted moments of revelation: “There’s no place like home.” She leaves home soon enough, however, bound for California, where her new life as drug-free poet and writer will soon begin.
Energized by Karr’s sharp wit, this tale of Texas adolescence reads like a fast-paced novel. More importantly, her clear-eyed recollection of what it’s like to change from child into woman resonates with truth.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-89274-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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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