Gushing, not to say ecstatic, exercise in groupiespeak, and a sequel to Des Barres's I'm with the Band (1987). Des Barres's follow-up to her days with the rock fabs begins as a rerun but soon settles into the downside of her glory days: adult life, more or less, though the endless name-dropping requires a rock-'n'-roll directory. As the memoir begins, still-unmarried Pamela Miller, introduced on the Today show as ``Queen of the Groupies'' (``Wow. What a twisted and unique legacy. I never know whether to defend myself or take a bow''), is madly in love with drug-and-booze-ridden Michael Des Barres, a ``glitter-glam'' British rock star who has just helped form a new group, which flops. Insecure Mike and moaning Pam fly to jobs on both coasts and hop over to England to see Mike's parents. Pam's own group, Girls Totally Outrageous, folds, but Pam runs about getting film parts (with Sly Stallone in Paradise Alley, among others) and finding entertainment niches for her talents. But ``the magic dust on the Sunset Strip had turned into sticky wads of filthy goop that stuck to the bottom of my platforms.'' Pam and Mike buddy or room with burgeoning greats Don Johnson, Melanie Griffith, Tom Cruise, and others. Throughout, Pam keeps a diary (excerpted occasionally here), and at last marries bombed-out Mike and has a child. Eventually, Mike joins AA, which works for him, and by book's end is a tower of honesty—but not before he begins playing around during early sobriety, leading to an inevitable separation. Meanwhile, Pam lands a big-time rock star (known here only as ``HIM'') and has a yearlong, super-private sex affair ``on this flaming rocket trip to the stratosphere.'' Dumbfoundingly overripe musk, but just right for the right ears. (Photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 17, 1992
ISBN: 0-688-09149-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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