Poetic, vivid and stained with tears of regret.
A junkie hipster’s memoir of his vagabond life doubles as a love letter to his brilliant, troubled older sister.
Literary folk may have recognized Geng only as the drugged, thieving brother of legendary New Yorker humorist Veronica Geng, but on the sketchier side of Manhattan, he was himself a legend, albeit of a very different kind. Record Steve, or just plain “Rec,” could boost whole shelves’ worth of LPs from stores on a daily basis. As related in his sharp, picaresque memoir, he was a long time coming to this notoriety and certainly earned it. Born in 1943, an army brat who spent most of his childhood in Philadelphia, Geng developed a taste for trouble as his bitter, irascible father was reassigned to bases in Germany and France. There, easy access to jazz clubs, Beat literature and drugs helped form the author’s future; his models were “the hipster, the hophead, and the hustler.” Back in the U.S., he fit right into the ’60s Greenwich Village scene, described here with memorable vitality as a trickster world of jazz and scams through which he flitted for several decades in a fun-and-danger-seeking haze. As Geng’s underworld star rose, so did the literary reputation of “Ronnie,” the sister he loved more than anything and hated to disappoint. While Steve ran scams and fenced stolen goods to feed his habit, she wrote humor pieces for the New Yorker, edited Philip Roth and had bad affairs with a number of Manhattan luminaries. (In addition to a sharp wit, the siblings shared strong self-destructive tendencies.) Geng is an astute chronicler of his milieu, sharply evoking everything from Village taverns to the “soulful and lighthearted energy” of black juke joints in the Florida town where he lived for a while with his dying father. He’s also a writer of powerful emotion, exploring the highs and lows of his fraught relationship with the tragically mercurial Ronnie.
Poetic, vivid and stained with tears of regret.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-8050-8056-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
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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