Readers unfamiliar with Galeano’s kaleidoscopic presentation may be baffled. Fans of his style will find this a gem.
Never mind James Frey’s modest inventions. Uruguayan writer Galeano (Upside Down, 2000, etc.), with delightful daring, assumes that his story is universal, and that our stories are, too—and they need not even be strictly true.
Galeano’s book, a series of mostly impressionistic vignettes never more than a page long, starts with ponderings on blue-green algae and jumps at once to protohominid footprints along an East African lake. Gradually, historical figures appear, denizens of Iberia and elsewhere in Europe—but wait, for here comes the soccer hero Diego Maradona streaking across the sky, illuminating the ancient houses of Córdoba. Well, time is time, always malleable; and, as Galeano writes, “We are made of time. / We are its feet and its voice. / The feet of time walk in our shoes.” Time is a theme to which Galeano frequently adverts and reverts; historical figures such as Isaac Asimov (pondering why it rains at sea), Christopher Columbus and John Paul III are merely along for the ride. Throughout, Galeano makes cameos, as when he serves as a judge in a sixth-grade writing contest, glad to hear that one little girl loves her teacher because “he’d taught her not to be afraid of being wrong.” As for the real wrongdoers: Suffice it to say that George W. Bush would not be pleased to read these headlines, written as if channeled through Borges, Faulkner, García Márquez and Guevara. The news the author brings consists of anecdote and reminiscence, but more in little-known pieces of history and observation that instruct and admonish. Children suffer and have always suffered, the poor will not inherit the earth and the killers at Columbine “wanted to hijack a plane and crash it into the twin towers in New York.”
Readers unfamiliar with Galeano’s kaleidoscopic presentation may be baffled. Fans of his style will find this a gem.Pub Date: May 9, 2006
ISBN: 0-8050-7767-7
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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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