In her second collection of New York Times pieces, Quindlen (Object Lessons, 1991, etc.) lets loose with her trademark intelligence, fervor, and personal focus on topics ranging from the Gulf War through absent fathers to the controversy over abortion. ``But is it really necessary for you to wear your gender on your sleeve?,'' an eager young journalist once asked the author. Citing her role model, editorialist Dorothy Thompson (who when told she had ``the brains of a man'' insisted she was ``altogether female''), Quindlen reiterates her belief that she owes it to herself, to the female reporters who broke ground for her generation at the Times, and to her readers to comment on world events from her underrepresented and valuable female viewpoint. Writing with greater maturity and depth than in her ``Life in the 30s'' column (Living Out Loud, 1988), she confidently proceeds to filter the abortion issue through her own experience as a Catholic mother of three; consider euthanasia from the perspective of a dying man's wife; observe her daughter's second birthday while considering that women as a whole still earn less than men; mull over the premature revelation of Arthur Ashe's case of AIDS from the point of view of a seasoned reporter; and lambast the Times, as a journalist and a woman, for revealing the name of the alleged rape victim in the William Kennedy Smith trial. Whimsical moments appear sporadically (Quindlen predicts the next movie blockbuster, Mom Alone), but rage surfaces more frequently from this woman writing in what she—perhaps optimistically—calls ``a world in which we can wear our gender on our sleeves.'' ``I'd love to run your column, but we already run Ellen Goodman,'' one newspaper editor candidly told Quindlen. Until the quota increases past one, here's a way for more readers to fall in love with at least one woman's very personal brand of passion.
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-40711-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1993
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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