A good read for armchair travelers.
Memoir of building a life in the remote Brazilian jungle.
In 1989, with their children grown and an itch for change, Le Breton (The Greatest Gift: The Courageous Life and Martyrdom of Sister Dorothy Stang, 2008, etc.) and her husband Robin left Washington, D.C., and purchased a farm in an isolated mountain region in southeastern Brazil. They named the farm Iracambi, a Tupi Indian word meaning “Land of Milk and Honey.” However, it was anything but, with no electricity, no plumbing, no phone, mud roads that became impassable when it rained and a bridge to their property that threatened to collapse at any minute. Robin, an agricultural economist, was more prepared for the challenge of their new life, but Le Breton, a concert pianist, doubted her abilities and willingness to make Iracambi her permanent home. Perhaps more troubling was the insular and conservative nature of their new neighbors, who were passive in the face of generations of grinding poverty and deeply suspicious of outsiders. But there was work to be done, and slowly life on the farm began to improve. Iracambi became a successful cattle ranch, and Robin began plans for a new farm house. To help them, they hired a number of local people, and through such contacts they formed mutual bonds of respect and, eventually, love. Le Breton and Robin became a catalyst for much-needed change in the region, hiring women to work on seeding forest land and encouraging their new friends to take local elections seriously and elect leadership that would actually do something for them. Change did come, with new schools, paved roads, health services and, in the local village, the universal sign of progress: “a forest of television antennae.” The author changed as well, coming to love Iracambi and finding herself more capable than she thought.
A good read for armchair travelers.Pub Date: May 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-57405-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
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
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