Unremarkable showbiz fare—frothy, easy optimism from a TV performer.
The autobiography of 46-year-old TV reporter and anchor Kotb. She’s the one with the odd name perched next to Kathie Lee Gifford.
The author hails from the Oklahoma heartland, where her Egyptian parents arrived not long after their wedding. After traveling the world with her family, the author did the same in her nascent career as a journalist, though she first reported the news in local TV markets. She enjoyed her New Orleans gig and is inspired still by the spirit of the Big Easy. Then came Dateline NBC in 1998, where she relished assignments overseas—though she admits she was apprehensive amid gunfire, while seasoned colleague Jim Maceda was simply irritated by the racket. Since 2007, she has been the regular convivial sidekick on the fourth hour of The Today Show. Kotb’s narrative of recent years gains strength as she looks at her diagnosis of breast cancer, her husband’s infidelity and the divorce proceedings. Throughout the book, the author is relentlessly upbeat, and she relates her story with simple declarative sentences that occasionally enter cringe-worthy territory. Hair is a major problem, Mom’s baklava is the best and “Stone Phillips is—so—incredibly—hot. He just is.” Kotb is fond of Beyoncé, as well as “Matt, Al, Meredith, Ann, Natalie, the producers, and the crew.” Ready to date again, she notes that she loves her family and music, but dislikes neatness and haute couture.
Unremarkable showbiz fare—frothy, easy optimism from a TV performer.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8948-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
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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