Mokotoff, despite a tendency to dwell on mundane and superficial details, constructs a devastating memoir that is both an...
A tragic memoir of childhood sexual abuse and one man’s struggle to comprehend its lasting repercussions.
The book opens with the death of Mokotoff’s (Fallible, 2009) ex-wife, Tina. After recounting the horrific details of Tina’s demise as the result of years of alcoholism, Mokotoff chronicles the beginning of their relationship. He is the first to admit his initial naïveté about Tina’s penchant for alcohol and evasion of discussing her troubled past, yet as he continues to feign ignorance into the early years of their marriage, it’s hard to sympathize with such persistent denial. Mokotoff’s retrospective observations are also riddled with clunky dialogue and excessively detailed descriptions, such as grocery lists and physical appearances, which inhibit the reader’s ability to feel emotionally connected to the author’s plight. As he continues to recall missed warning signs, Mokotoff peppers the story with enlightening though sometimes awkwardly placed explanations of Tina’s family history. Through these details and Tina’s eventual confession, the reader learns how she and other siblings were all victims of varying degrees of sexual abuse at the hands of an alcoholic stepfather. Unfortunately, Mokotoff doesn’t realize how deeply these experiences affected his wife until it’s too late. Finding solace in drink, Tina manages to hide her alcohol consumption until she finally crosses the line into destructive, inescapable alcoholism. Multiple failed stints in rehab lead to the irrevocable breakdown of the Mokotoff’s marriage as Tina withdraws further into the dark world of addiction and Mokotoff is unable to come to terms with her illness. Sadly, it’s only after the death of Tina and her brother that her remaining family could begin a process of healing; it’s this process that Mokotoff successfully facilitates and relays through his account. In a final and touching part of the memoir, Mokotoff’s teenage daughter Emily reflects on her relationship with her mother. It is here that we finally see a genuine glimpse of Tina that was frustratingly absent in the rest of the book.
Mokotoff, despite a tendency to dwell on mundane and superficial details, constructs a devastating memoir that is both an act of closure and a cautionary tale.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2011
ISBN: 978-0741469571
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Infinity
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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