A memoir from the shadows that’s just as fascinating as those that inhabit the spotlight.
A ghostwriter pens her own revealing story.
Cagan (Peace Is Possible, 2007, etc.) has worked as a professional writer for more than 20 years. On the surface, she’s lived an enviable, adventurous life, hobnobbing with the rich and famous and traveling the world. Yet her memoir is an honest, balanced reflection that follows the circuitous path she took to achieving peace and, perhaps, contentment. Cagan was a dancer for years before taking a foray into acting and eventually ending up as a writer. The self-confidence and discipline that Cagan learned in ballet helped her in many of her subsequent challenges and prepared her for the unconventional life she would ultimately lead. Later, as a ghostwriter, she learned the art of ordering the chaos of another person’s life and truly dissolving her own self to become “the other.” The memoir then reflects on her work as a writer in addition to other aspects of her past, such as failed marriages, her relationship with her mother, and the death of a loved one. She explores broad topics, such as religion and aging, offering numerous anecdotes and relating hard lessons she’s learned. It’s an intriguing and potentially frightening undertaking to move from composing others’ stories to exposing one’s own inner workings. As Cagan does so, she’s often candid, humorous, reflective, and remorseful; she doesn’t shy away from divulging the darker aspects of her life, including frequent drug use and abusive relationships. Her memoir takes a nonlinear, thematically organized approach. This strategy pays off as the chapters pull from different eras of her life, connected by thematic threads. In “Intrepid,” for example, the topics range from her father’s fearlessness to her own courage years later volunteering at an AIDS hospice. In the closing pages, Cagan wonders whether she’s “done enough” to pen an interesting memoir. Simply put: she has.
A memoir from the shadows that’s just as fascinating as those that inhabit the spotlight.Pub Date: June 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5053-1962-0
Page Count: 286
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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