Isherwood was unquestionably a fascinating man. True fans of his work as well as gossip lovers will no doubt read all three...
Final volume of the meticulously detailed diaries of the acclaimed author of Goodbye to Berlin (1939) and other celebrated works.
Isherwood (1904–1986), who, writes Edmund White in his preface, “had a personality that sparkled,” was the icon of the infant gay liberation movement during the 1970s, where this collection picks up. Editor Bucknell’s (What You Will, 2008, etc.) close knowledge of the man and his world may have eased her monumental task, but it may be difficult going for readers not privy to the vast assortment of friends that Isherwood collected throughout his lifetime. In the last 135 pages, the editor presents a glossary explaining personages cited often or only once, events mentioned in passing and Hindu terminology. Most readers should consult the glossary first, as footnotes prove to be little more than distractions pointing out typos and errata. Isherwood knew that one day his diaries would be published, but readers may wonder if he assumed the mundane quotidian drivel would be edited out. The entries drag as he lists his weight, visits to the gym, swims in the ocean, movies attended, lunch with this famous cultural icon, dinner with another famous person, etc. His complete comfort with his homosexuality, his adoration of his partner, American portrait artist Don Bachardy, and the sheer variety of people whose “friendship never ends” may keep the pages turning for more dedicated readers, but his comments on his writing projects and these later diaries don’t really expose the man as writer, only as the man who writes.
Isherwood was unquestionably a fascinating man. True fans of his work as well as gossip lovers will no doubt read all three volumes of his diaries. For the rest of us, a simple biography should be sufficient.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-208474-3
Page Count: 928
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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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