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THE ACCIDENTAL ACTIVIST

A PERSONAL AND POLITICAL MEMOIR

The sister of Newt tells all—well, at least she tells some. Candace Gingrich, certainly as famous for who she sleeps with as for who she is related to, here tells how she became a gay activist. Gingrich seems almost preternaturally unaware of politics in her early life, preferring rugby and tree-climbing to paying attention to her older brother. Her ignorance is shaken only when Newt pointedly refers to gays as ``against God''; Gingrich is both ashamed of and furious at her half-brother, whom she accuses of pandering to the right. While there is not much here of significance—this is the slightest of books, with little in the way of political insight—Gingrich is sweet and unassuming, and her coming-out scenes are touching and surprisingly gentle. She should have examined her family dynamic a little more closely but does drop little hints of it, such as her casual remark that Newt didn't come home for Thanksgiving even after his fixed-income parents bought a new table for the occasion, and that his mother keeps a hefty Newt scrapbook, to the annoyance of her other children. But this memoir seems more like Candace's own scrapbook, heavy on the rugby and her longtime job with UPS, with rather less space than necessary devoted to her activities as a gay rights activist. Her story (told with Advocate editor Bull—also coauthor of Perfect Enemies, see p. 869) is certainly more apple pie than expected, but it is a small story, nonetheless, and unlikely to speak to anyone but the already converted.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-684-82462-0

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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GENGHIS KHAN AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD

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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