Roth—the most relentlessly and trickily autobiographical of major American novelists—now offers "to demythologize myself and play it straight, to pair the facts as lived with the facts as presented." This book was written, he says, in the wake of a 1987 nervous breakdown—"to transform myself into myself, I began rendering experience untransformed"—and it consists of five smallish memoirs for his life up to around age 35. . .plus a fine (and necessary) zinger of an epilogue. The first, very brief section is a quasi-idyllic view of growing-up Jewish in lower-middle-class, 1940's New Jersey: aware of anti-Semitism, but thriving on baseball, adolescent camaraderie with other Jewish-American kids, and reliable parents. (There's also a touching portrait of Roth's relationship today with his old, frail father.) Next comes "Joe College"—in which Philip eagerly goes away to college, to Bucknell; he joins in the clownish doings of a Jewish fraternity, edits an irreverent campus journal, and acquires a steady girlfriend (furtive sex, pregnancy panics). Then, in the ironically titled "Girl of My Dreams," Roth chronicles his long, turbulent affair with—and eventual marriage to—non-Jewish Josie, divorced mother of two, "raving within and stolildly blond without." For Roth (newly published, a U. of Chicago instructor/grad-student), this was a chance to prove his de-ghetto-ization and his gutsiness—"by dint of taming the most fearson female that a boy of my background might be unfortunate enough to meet on the erotic battlefield." The result, however, was a nightmare of abortions, quarrels, "a running feud focused on my character flaws," and a wedding-by-trickery that Roth later dramatized in My Life as a Man. The fourth chapter, "All in the Family," focuses on the Jewish anti-Roth furor triggered by his story "Defender of the Faith"; the "angry Jewish resistance that I aroused," he says, "was the luckiest break I could have had. I was branded"—and compelled to keep writing about Jews. So the final memoir inevitably involves the creation of the notorious Portnoy's Complaint—which grew out of Roth's ugly breakup and court battle with Josie, his psychoanalysis, a five-year relationship with another (gentler) "shiksa," and the stormy mood of the 1960's. All five sequences are crisp, ironically humorous, engagingly thoughtful. Yet there's a feeling throughout that Roth is tending to skim the surface, to smooth the edges, of some very raw, complicated material. And Roth himself must have shared that feeling—because the epilogue is a blistering 35-page review of the book by. . .Nathan Zuckerman, that irrepressible alter ego. Zuckerman finds the memoirs too "kind, discreet, careful" to be truthful; he mocks the idyllic "romance of your childhood," distrusts the portrait of Josie ("Everything you are today you owe to an alcoholic shiksa"), and wonders why Roth's sexual compulsions get so little attention, it's a slightly precious gimmick—but a neat, corrosive windup to a semi-absorbing semi-autobiography that raises as many questions as it answers.
Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1988
ISBN: 0679749055
Page Count: 195
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1988
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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