Filmmaker and progressive activist Moore comes roaring back with his first new book since Dude, Where’s My Country? (2003).
The author’s theme this time, at least organizationally, is himself—he calls this “a book of short stories based on events that took place in the early years of my life,” even though many of the stories are set in his fifth and sixth decades and, so far as we know, they’re factual rather than fictitious. Think of it as a memoir turned slightly on its side. Whatever the case, it’s vintage Moore, beginning with a highly satisfying tale of redemption (and gloat-free revenge) in the wake of his condemnation of George W. Bush at the Academy Awards ceremony. Moore was no stranger to death threats, but after that episode, they came fast and furious, and he had to hire bodyguards—and not just to satisfy unfounded paranoia. Homeland Security, he alleges, even keyed his gold Oscar statue, “scratching long lines into its gold plate.” Fast-forward a few years, and Moore is, if not a hero, at least no longer persona non grata, now that the rest of country has caught up with the dissimulations and deceptions of the Bush administration. Elsewhere, the author writes of footloose ancestors who brought his bloodline to blue-collar Michigan and their peculiar big-headed evolutionary marker: “The craniums in our part of the country were designed to leave a little extra room for the brain to grow should we ever have a chance to learn anything outside of our rigid and insular lives.” From the pleasures of night baseball to family arguments over long hair and Vietnam to early forays into politics, Moore turns in a readable, and often quite funny, American story. Indeed, Moore considers himself a patriot; as he writes, if you see his movies, “you will instantly know that I deeply love this country.” This spirited, most welcome book is more evidence of that affection.
Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-446-53224-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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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