A warm tribute to a rather bossy know-it-all companion in arms who was hugely talented and fiercely devoted.
An adoring biography of Nora Ephron (1941-2012) explores her motivations as a writer and a feminist.
Washington Post columnist Cohen (Israel: Is It Good for the Jews?, 2014, etc.) first met Ephron in 1968 through their mutual friend Post journalist Carl Bernstein, who became Ephron’s second husband. Their friendship deepened and lasted more than 40 years, until her death by cancer, an illness largely kept secret from her other friends and the public. In this gracious, elegant eulogy to his friend, Cohen endearingly suggests that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, feeling his way as he goes along, sounding other friends and acquaintances for memories. He reveals charming vulnerabilities about Ephron as well as traits, such as her evident delight in name-dropping and hanging with the A-list, that don’t necessarily make her lovable to readers. Ephron was, above all, a fearless writer, from her college years at Wellesley to her early elbow-sharpening jobs at the New York Post and Esquire, where there were few women mentors and she learned to write fast and sharp amid a newsroom of rough-and-tumble men. She was feared for her frankness, and her targets included Bernstein, skewered in her biting post-marriage sendup Heartburn (both book and film). Ephron’s segue from screenwriter to director seemed natural, as she had been studying at the feet of friend Mike Nichols since their collaboration on Silkwood. Her film Sleepless in Seattle would became a kind of schmaltzy classic; ditto You’ve Got Mail and her final screenplay, Julie and Julia. Cohen captures a brilliant woman full of contradictions: she was a “girlie girl” and homemaker, queen of dinner parties and also a fierce feminist, yet insecure about her looks, the size of her breasts, and her inevitable aging neck—all of which she examined in her provocative writing.
A warm tribute to a rather bossy know-it-all companion in arms who was hugely talented and fiercely devoted.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9612-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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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