Uses a spatula to apply icing rather than a blade to slice and reveal.
The author of Snow White and numerous other postmodern classics gets a generous biography from a former student.
Though well researched, this is an old-fashioned, fond celebration rather than a dispassionate analysis of Donald Barthelme’s life (1931–89). Novelist Daugherty (English and Creative Writing/Oregon State Univ.; Late in the Standoff, 2005, etc.) begins and ends with appreciative, affecting memories of his encounters with Barthelme during the 1980s, first as professor and grad student at the University of Houston, then as friends. The pages in between take a traditional look at a most unusual man and writer. Daugherty sketches the family’s history in Texas, spending considerable time on the substantial architectural career of Barthelme’s father, also named Donald. The biographer then glances at young Don’s childhood and early manhood, noting numerous Oedipal conflicts that would crop up again. He points to the influences of Thurber and Perelman and the New Yorker, which later gave Barthelme his biggest break and most frequent exposure—though fiction editor Roger Angell never let his championship of the writer keep him from rejecting work he considered inferior. Daugherty usefully explores his subject’s considerable background and expertise in the visual arts; Barthelme managed a Houston museum for a time and worked on an art magazine in New York. Married three times, he remained on genial terms with wives one and two, sired two daughters and loved women till throat cancer ended it all. He drank a lot too, and his biographer seems to see booze more as a creative lubricant than a smiling but bitter enemy. Barthelme enjoyed positive reviews until near the end of his life, when he left New York and returned to teach at the University of Houston, where the author avers he was treated as the great celebrity he indeed was in the literary world. Daugherty loves Barthelme’s fiction, seldom uttering a discouraging word, and views his subject with affectionate, grateful eyes.
Uses a spatula to apply icing rather than a blade to slice and reveal.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-37868-4
Page Count: 592
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
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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