Whether she’s writing about threesomes, foursomes or the possibility of moresomes, the San Francisco–based cartoonist...
Girlish innocence and disarming candor mark a graphic memoir that often reads like an illustrated diary.
Whether she’s writing about threesomes, foursomes or the possibility of moresomes, the San Francisco–based cartoonist MariNaomi exudes a sweetness undefiled by experience. She begins before her birth, with the courtship of her father, an Army officer teaching English in Japan, and his teenage pupil, nine years younger. The author dedicates the book to her parents, “who I pray will still speak to me after they read [it],” and then proceeds to detail her encounters, year-by-year, with a variety of boys and an occasional girl. She begins with a chapter titled “The most beautiful penis I’ve ever seen,” describing her sexual awakening in an episode that others might consider pedophilia. The story introduces the image of the butterfly, through which stages of development the book progresses. The vast majority of her encounters take no more than one page, six panels at most, making the longer episodes seem all the more ambitious and creatively audacious. One of them recounts her loss of virginity at age 14 (“Even though it got better, I was glad when it was over”), and another vividly describes her maiden voyage on LSD. As she matures, MariNaomi often presents herself as clueless about what she was doing, why and with whom, whether she was the seducer or the one being seduced. She seemed to fall into sex with boys who left her shortly after, and/or with whom she had nothing in common, and/or who were originally more attracted to one of her girlfriends. Eventually, she began to find some of her girlfriends more attractive than the boys with whom she continued to involve herself.Pub Date: March 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-200923-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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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