Genuinely remorseful and heartfelt, yet strangely unremarkable.
Redress and atonement mar a boy’s adolescence after the accidental death of a classmate.
In 1988, Strauss (Writing/New York Univ.; More Than It Hurts You, 2008, etc.), one month shy of his high-school graduation, struck Celine Zilke while out on a joyride with friends in his hometown of Glen Head, Long Island. Zilke, a popular 16-year-old girl who was the “lively athletic type,” remained unconscious and succumbed to her injuries a day after the accident. “No charges were filed,” and Strauss was deemed innocent by “unprovisional absolution.” The author suffered through Celine’s funeral and endured endless days of painful introspection and the shame of his classmates’ collective shunning. Some of these early events may strike some readers as implausible—his astonishingly indifferent parents’ advice to go to the movies after the accident, or that the author “slept soundly” that same night. The complexity of his burgeoning emotions would be nothing compared to the million-dollar lawsuit Celine’s once-forgiving parents shockingly filed while Strauss was in his first year at Tufts University. Before the trial, the author suspected that Celine had committed suicide since she’d foretold her death, to the exact day, in a journal. The lawsuit proceedings stalled for five years (“like when a dark sky decides not to rain”) and eventually the case dissolved, but the lasting effects of the event haunted an obsessive Strauss for decades, with lasting emotional, sociological and physical implications. At age 30, his new wife Susannah offered the strength and levelheadedness needed for the author to cope with his overwhelming survivor’s guilt. Strauss tells his “accident memoir” in economical, well-honed prose, oscillating between the remorseful and the glib, but benign platitudes about shock (“If everything couldn’t continue as planned, no real plans could be made”), death, Manhattan and relationships often feel like filler.
Genuinely remorseful and heartfelt, yet strangely unremarkable.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-934781-70-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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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