In this articulate but angst-laden memoir, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse charts the evolution of his personality flaws and sexual compulsions. Ryan, the award-winning author of three books of poetry, was molested repeatedly by a male neighbor when he was five, in the early 1950s. This, in conjunction with his father's vicious alcoholism, severely compromised Ryan's emotional development, and he presents his childhood and adolescence as an endless string of embarrassments and evasions. At age nine, just arrived in Allentown, Penn., Ryan bragged that he was a great baseball pitcher; of course, when challenged, he turned out not to be. The lies and groundless bragging continued, as did his failures. He was dumped by his first girlfriend because of his relentless idealization of her. He mocked and insulted his classmates, which cost him all his remaining friends. He got fat. His grades plummeted. He masturbated a lot. He took up bowling. But by his senior year of high school, he had (for reasons unexplained) slimmed down, concentrated on his schoolwork, and began to get dates—but what he wanted from girls was impersonal sex or heavy petting, and he would invariably drop them after a few sessions. In 1964 he entered Notre Dame, where he eventually became an outstanding scholar but continued to have unsatisfactory relations with women. Ryan jumps from his student days to 1981, when he lost a job at Princeton for sleeping with students, and then another decade, when he finally comes to terms with being a ``sex addict'' who has completely depersonalized the sexual act. Unwisely, Ryan opens with 50 pages summarizing his sex addiction, his molestation, and his father's alcoholism; the narrative punch of the remaining 300 pages is hugely diminished, and many details are pointlessly repeated. Ryan barely mentions his poetry—he's edited out everything but humiliation and depravity. A downbeat account of a confused, unhappy life. (Author tour)
Pub Date: July 11, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-40775-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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