Ribon’s numerous fans should welcome this retelling of “things she shouldn’t share in public,” now twined with her adult...
Blogger, TV writer, “retired derby girl [and] Wonder Killer” Ribon (You Take It from Here, 2013, etc.) provides a contemporary perspective on her younger self’s most intimate teenage longings.
During her adolescent years, the author kept copies of the letters and notes she wrote to the various boys targeted for her affections. Along with her journal entries, those letters—to Thirty-Six Hours Boy, Silent Skateboarder Boy, Homeroom Boy, Nice Boy and Super Mario Brothers Boy—comprise much of the narrative thread, with chapter titles including “I Turned Sixteen and Got Really Horny on April 15th,” “Dear Dorkhouse Forum” and “My Year of Dicks.” Ribon explains her reasoning for retaining these embarrassing missives: “While most of you would probably not find it wise to publish your teenage diaries, it is an effective way to get people off your ass for saving all your shit, along with the bonus of a possible tax deduction once you reach Hoarding Level 3, also know as ‘I’d better rent a storage unit before I end up with a divorce.’ ” If reading through the detritus of Ribon’s adolescent longings is not tiresome enough, the author includes, in bold type, contemporary dissections of her previous copious correspondence and overwrought interior landscape. “The real tragedy is that nobody ever pulled me aside to gently inform me that some feelings I should keep inside, that not everybody deserves my truth,” she writes. “Or at least so much of my truth.” Many readers may agree with that sentiment.
Ribon’s numerous fans should welcome this retelling of “things she shouldn’t share in public,” now twined with her adult musings. For others, it’s a tedious slog through a year in the life of a teenager who, as the author herself recalled, wrote obsessively, compulsively and constantly.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-940207-05-6
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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