The conclusions reached are familiar, but Schaap’s talent for balancing self-revelation with humor, melancholy and wisdom...
A memoir from This American Life contributor and New York Times Magazine “Drink” columnist Schaap.
The author extolls the pleasures of “bar regularhood,” focusing on those establishments with distinct atmospheres—sometimes evoking European cafe societies, other times fondly portraying out-of-the-way places with colorful owners—to demonstrate how they can serve as “relief from isolation,” a “refuge from the too-deep and too-personal,” and a means for broadening one’s ability to listen and empathize with others. Schaap briefly acknowledges the negative aspects, especially for women who frequent bars alone, but she paints a mostly romantic portrait of discovering friendship and conviviality that is gradually tempered over time. Each chapter recounts her experiences in a particular bar—often in New York, with excursions to Dublin as well as Montreal—as touchstones that allow her to explore major turning points, from being a teenager who dropped out of high school and became a Deadhead to becoming a student at Bennington College, finding love, working as a chaplain in the aftermath of 9/11, as well as her father’s death, separation and bartending in the present. Schaap suggests that early trials served as catalysts for seeking company away from home, though she admits that the need for regularhood lessened with age. The author only briefly touches on alcoholism, one possible explanation for the hundreds of hours spent in bars; what remains is a brisk, lucid account of finding a tenuous peace after a period of escapism.
The conclusions reached are familiar, but Schaap’s talent for balancing self-revelation with humor, melancholy and wisdom turn an otherwise niche topic into one with greater appeal.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59448-711-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
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
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