Next book

MESS

ONE MAN’S STRUGGLE TO CLEAN UP HIS HOUSE AND HIS ACT

Yourgrau provides engaging company for most of that span, but the actual decluttering in the book might have taken less than...

A memoir about decluttering an apartment.

This isn’t a how-to book providing a step-by-step program to overcoming clutter, though Yourgrau (Wearing Dad’s Head, 1999, etc.) does chronicle his visit to Clutterers Anonymous, which the author didn’t find particularly helpful except to provide comparisons with those worse off than he is. Mainly, the book is the result of an intervention by the author’s girlfriend, whose success as a food critic contrasts sharply with the author’s self-deprecating lack of achievement. Her intervention inspired his writing project, which is to chronicle his clean-up project, though he discovers along the way that “doing my Project actually gets in the way of my decluttering!” Yourgrau shares histories of famous hoarders, psychological theories about clutter and its relationship with OCD and PTSD, and plenty of family memories, some of which seem to be distorted, about his ambiguous relationship with his late parents, memories that his penchant for clutter helps keep alive. “I hadn’t yet learned how to grieve properly,” he concludes after relating the death of his mother, one of the more moving sections of the book. Yet through much of the narrative, the author seems to be stalling, procrastinating, and distracting himself—all symptoms of the hoarder yet occasionally as frustrating to readers as they must have been to his girlfriend. Not until Page 80 does he announce, “Now for actual cleaning”—though, even then, not much gets cleaned too quickly. As the memoir progresses to the climactic dinner he will host and cook to share the livability of the apartment, where he was previously ashamed to admit visitors, he writes, “It had now been almost two years since my Project began.”

Yourgrau provides engaging company for most of that span, but the actual decluttering in the book might have taken less than a chapter.

Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-393-24177-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: April 20, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Next book

GENGHIS KHAN AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD

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

Close Quickview