Food as a way to remember or a way to forget—either way, Abu-Jaber gets it just right.
Stories of family and food that spread out like pancake batter on a griddle are about “grace, difference, faith, and love,” writes Abu-Jaber (Crescent, 2003, etc.).
Abu-Jaber is the daughter of a Jordanian father and an American mother (though there’s also a German grandmother thrown into the mix, who adds rigorous counterpoint to the wayward intuitiveness of Abu-Jaber’s father). The stem of the narrative is about the author’s precollege youth, an appealing sequence about making and losing friends, testing the waters, endeavoring to find a way forward. Its foliage is a swarming recollection of food and exile; though Abu-Jaber’s father immigrated to the US of his own free will, he feels the bite of his homeland enough to move the family there for a year. What soothes the Jordan in his heart is a piping knaffea, or a “shish kebab that comes like an emergency,” eaten hot off the grill. Abu-Jaber, too, will be shaped by food, both her father’s and that of the immigrants around her: she wants to confess her sins after her first bite of panna cotta, and she warms her frostbitten toes in a bowl of Arabic soup made of bright herbs and orange peels. Her father is restless, moving the family here and there, the geography fluid while the daughter’s social life is constrained by the father’s edicts. But if he is protective on the fatherly front, he is expansive when it comes to food and, more affectingly, to the stories of his family. Abu-Jaber’s tales are equally powerful and lovely in their imagery, from the faux pas of barbequing in their front yard in the US to the car ride they take late at night, to the Dead Sea, where the road is “dusty blue and smells like the woolly heat of a sheep’s back.”
Food as a way to remember or a way to forget—either way, Abu-Jaber gets it just right.Pub Date: March 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-42304-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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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