No bling-bling, no flava.
Tiresome, simple-minded autobiography from the New York radio personality.
Reared in middle-class Wayside, New Jersey, Williams knew from childhood that radio was her destiny. While a freshman at Northeastern, she approached the campus radio station and was soon reading the news on air. An internship at Boston’s number-one radio station led to a job offer in St. Croix. After only eight months on the island, Williams broke into the Washington, D.C., AM market. As her career was taking off, however, she developed a lengthy cocaine addiction. Despite the drugs and involvements with less-than-stellar men, Williams continued to achieve, eventually making it into the FM hip-hop market in New York City. She married, went through a messy divorce, and then met future husband Kevin, also involved in the business. They struggled to have a child, but right after the birth of their son, Williams discovered that Kevin was cheating on her. A quick trip to a private detective and the wronged wife realized that “ultimately speaking,” she won. Following this revelation is a transcript of a conversation with her husband describing the affair and its resolution, and the whole thing wraps up with author’s relationship rules and career advice—all of it embarrassingly simplistic. Instead of juicy insider gossip, Williams focuses strictly on herself. (She includes a brief mention of Salt N Pepa—but only because they invited her to replace their deejay, who was leaving to get married.) Despite her advice to readers that “there is no excuse for not being able to speak well,” Williams (or her coauthor) has chosen to write her narrative in the most casual of street slang. On competition from other deejays: “Bitches and niggas every day are practicing to do my shit.” On loyalty: “Don’t insist on it and then be a shady motherfucker.”
No bling-bling, no flava.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-7021-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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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