Purportedly the writings of an autistic child who, when introduced to facilitated communication, revealed herself to be ``part angel, part seer.'' Jorde, the mother of young Adriana, is into spiritual growth, meditating, self-hypnosis, channeling, and past-life regression therapy; thus her fantastic claims about her daughter are not entirely surprising. It is she who tells Adri's story, and at the beginning it is an absorbing one. Part one is an account of the child's early years and of Jorde and her husband's struggle to discover what is wrong with their child and, after finally receiving a diagnosis when Adri is four, their search for ways to help her. Part Two, titled ``Emergence,'' is something entirely different. It is Jorde's journal from March to September 1991, in which she describes and records many facilitated communication sessions with her nine-year-old dughter. Jorde acknowledges that this technique (in which the autistic person's hand is physically supported and guided at a keyboard by someone else) is controversial but dismisses skeptics. Adri relates that she has lived previous lives, knew Jesus, and in fact was his disciple John, that Cleopatra and Xerxes put a curse on her, that she is actually a powerful spiritual master named Pompeii, and that Jorde must listen to her spiritual guides, especially Mohammed. In Part Three, Jorde stretches credulity further by describing Adri's telepathic and telekinetic skillsshe is able to type words on her keyboard and turn her radio off and on while at a distance from these devices. Jorde concludes by quoting many of Adri's so-called messages about love, healing, God, truth, and mankind's future. Reminiscent of Birger Sellin's I Don't Want To Be Inside Me Anymore (p. 149), which was presented as the work of a talented young autistic man whose mother acted as his communication facilitator, but if possible, even less credible. (First printing of 100,000; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 18, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-38945-X
Page Count: 289
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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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