An appealing miscellany.
Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, children’s book author, and cultural observer Lurie (Emerita, English/Cornell Univ.; The Language of Houses: How Buildings Speak to Us, 2014, etc.) offers a personal perspective on literature, feminism, fashion, and treasured friendships.
Although a few of the essays—e.g., on women’s decisions to change their surnames after marriage, the meaning of aprons, or fashion’s arcane rules—seem dated and others rather slight, most are engaging. Among the liveliest are the author’s recollections of friendships with editor Barbara Epstein, writer and artist Edward Gorey, and poet James Merrill. Lurie met Epstein when both were students at Radcliffe—in the 1940s, Radcliffe women were “poor relations” compared to Harvard men, Lurie recalls in “Their Harvard”—and was impressed at once by her “quiet, often almost invisible brilliance” and her capacious reading. When Epstein became editor at the New York Review of Books, Lurie relied gratefully on both her editorial skill and “remarkable” tact. Also remembered with affection is the “immensely intelligent, perceptive, amusing, inventive, skeptical,” and “scarily gifted artist” Gorey, whom Lurie first met at a quirky bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They took excursions to make tombstone rubbings, were involved in the Poets’ Theatre of Cambridge, and, later, when both lived in Manhattan, became best friends. Gorey was inspired to write The Doubtful Guest by Lurie’s offhand comment that having a young child around all the time “was like having a houseguest who never said anything and never left.” Equally warm is Lurie’s portrait of Merrill, whom she admired for “how intensely aware he was of language, even in the most casual and banal circumstances.” One of the longest, and most captivating, essays, “What Happened in Hamlet,” recounts Lurie’s experience watching a month of rehearsals as Jonathan Miller directed the play in 1974, with Irene Worth as Gertrude and Peter Eyre as the beleaguered prince. Worth, Lurie writes, even offstage, emoted as if she had an audience of 500. Musings on “Pinocchio,” the Babar tales, Harry Potter, and “Rapunzel” stand out among essays on children’s books.
An appealing miscellany.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-883285-78-4
Page Count: 225
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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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