Like a summary of an intimate cocktail party someone held for his 1,001 closest friends.
Second volume of recollections from Offit (Memoir of the Bookie’s Son, 1995, etc.), this one an annotated roll call of the celebrities, literary and otherwise, he’s met in his nearly 80 years.
The disjointed text, loosely organized by theme and chronology, begins and ends with H.L. Mencken, who advised the undergraduate author to collect Willa Cather and never to relight a cigar. Offit starts emptying the celebrity container early—he also knew Russell Baker and John Barth back in Baltimore—and soon famous folks are spilling out like kernels of rice on the kitchen floor. Indeed, there are so many that they soon lose identity and significance. Still, the memoir has some notable moments. Offit credits Robert Frost for steering a desirable co-ed his way; he saw Dylan Thomas in a bar (no surprise there); he was upstaged by Moss Hart; he liked Adlai Stevenson and Betty Friedan and was surprised by the limp handshake of Mike Tyson. His long friendship with Kurt Vonnegut Jr. involved many regular tennis matches. He solicited advice on writing mysteries from half of the Ellery Queen team. Among the few folks with whom he did not get along was Saul Bellow, who pops up a few times to annoy. The author suspected Anatole Broyard was a Creole; he negotiated awkward moments with I.F. Stone and Pearl S. Buck. He saw both Buster Crabbe and a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone working out at the gym. He chatted with Langston Hughes and thought John Steinbeck “looked more like a retired fullback than a recent recipient of the Nobel Prize.” Kosinski, Malamud, Mailer, Ellison…on and on the names go, sometimes accompanied by an anecdote, sometimes not. Offit pauses occasionally to praise his wife and make sure we’re privy to compliments he’s received from reviewers and others.
Like a summary of an intimate cocktail party someone held for his 1,001 closest friends.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37522-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
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
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