Lushly detailed and full of eco-devotion, this candid narrative has much to say about human beings bearing burdens, coping,...
Kuipers (Operation Bite Back: Rod Coronado's War to Save American Wilderness, 2009, etc.) returns with a frank, personal, and sometimes-painful account of his fractured family.
The author, who has written about environmental issues for decades, tells a grim but ultimately uplifting story about his family, mostly his father, a serial adulterer in his first marriage but a man whom his three sons loved (despite his dominant personality), a man who eventually, writes Kuipers, became a responsible adult. We learn about his father’s history as well as his two brothers, one of whom has long battled psychological issues. We learn about the women in these men’s lives (more than one divorce) and about their children. But the dominating, unifying factor in their experiences is hunting. Kuipers is quick to assure us—and show us—that they are not mere trophy hunters but rather ecological ones. They eat what they kill, and they kill, it seems, respectfully. (In one scene, the author speaks to a buck he has just shot.) The author’s father believed that if he and his sons restored an old Michigan hunting camp he bought, it would improve their lives—and he was right. Year after year, they have planted, cultivated, and tenderly cared for the land, knowing that doing so would bring back the wildlife. Although the men often bickered and battled verbally with one another, they all eventually recognized the significance of what they created: unity and family. Kuipers alludes often to other writers and thinkers—from ecological scientists and eco-humanists to poets W.S. Merwin and Wendell Berry—and if he sometimes waxes a little spiritual/mystical, it is the magic of the land that animates him.
Lushly detailed and full of eco-devotion, this candid narrative has much to say about human beings bearing burdens, coping, and aiding one another.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63557-348-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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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