A highly candid memoir of parenthood that often fascinates and occasionally frustrates as the author tries to come to terms...
Permissive parenting clashes with adolescent rebellion amid the skateboarding subculture.
As the two skateboard-obsessed sons become increasingly disruptive to family harmony and the narrative proceeds from school discipline issues to pot-smoking defiance and legal skirmishes over trespassing and graffiti, it would seem that this is building toward a horrific climax. Thankfully for Thompson (A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert "Believe It or Not!" Ripley, 2013, etc.) and his family, the sons stepped back from the precipice toward the end of high school, straightened out, and found some sort of independent maturity. So what initially seemed like a cautionary tale turns out to be a rite-of-passage story. The lacerating power of some of the chapters comes from the author’s recognition that he has perhaps “become their enabler,” that he didn’t recognize where all this was leading until it was almost too late, and that his own teenage experiences with skateboarding and marijuana hadn’t prepared him for this brave new world. “If my 1970s skating had been a pastel-colored tableau, smooth like 1970s AM radio,” he writes, “the boys skated like a gray-hued mash-up of grunge, punk, and rap, all angsty and illegal.” Thompson also confesses to the insecurities of a writer whose career has stalled, who numbs himself with alcohol and has to hide the Xanax after his son tells him that it has become “the new heroin” among their crowd. Could this loving family have handled things differently? Definitely. Could they have handled things better? That’s more difficult to answer. The author admits that his wife worried that this book would “memorialize our incompetence,” while he countered that it would “celebrate our persistence.” It also shows that Thompson recognizes promising material when he sees it (and lives it) and knows how to heighten the drama for narrative momentum.
A highly candid memoir of parenthood that often fascinates and occasionally frustrates as the author tries to come to terms with the causes that have produced these particular effects.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-239434-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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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