Funnyman Pinkwater has written ``about 50'' children's books and illustrated most of them. For the past few years he's been doing short, laid-back spots on NPR. This book, sprung from the radio pieces, ``turns out,'' he says, ``to be a fragmentary autobiography.'' Just don't expect the kind of facts you'd get from Current Biography; Pinkwater has more interest in relating anecdotes, or just observing through his own bemused eyes. And so, in mostly one- to three-page bits suitable for reading in the bathroom, Pinkwater muses on or recollects some odd and ordinary moments from his Chicago childhood and later Zen-like art training there, his ``instructional malnutrition'' as a college art-student, his other spells and travels here and there, and his 12 years in Hoboken, ``my spiritual home for the rest of my life''—a ``quaint'' community preoccupied with crime and politics, ``which sometimes overlap,'' and inhabited by ``da-salt-u-da-eart, with some of the highest-grade eccentrics and loonies mixed in.'' Today he lives in an old farmhouse in upstate New York, where he is getting to know the crows, even though ``the guy who owned this little farm before we did had one of those psychoses in which the idea of being in America and killing everything living in the area are mixed in together.'' The book is all small stuff: An entry from recent years tells of his panic on hearing a slow-talking radio guy announce an upcoming concert of music by ``Daniel...Pink...ham.'' In the end, you might not know what Pinkwater's father actually did for a living...or how he met his wife...or much about his writing. But you might feel fond of this wiggy talent who has at least kept you smiling. And Pinkwater fans can have the fun of recognizing germs of his fiction here and there.
Pub Date: Nov. 21, 1991
ISBN: 0-201-52359-0
Page Count: 175
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1991
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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