The attempt to balance personal trauma with wider cultural reference is a tricky challenge, but this will resonate with...
A mother’s uncertainty about her baby daughter’s medical care pervades this unsettling memoir.
Silver (The Execution of Noa P. Singleton, 2014) is both a novelist and an attorney, occupations that provide different perspectives on her plight as a concerned parent. A few weeks after birth, her daughter, Abby, inexplicably began showing symptoms of a seizure, perhaps a prelude to something worse. She then developed an alarming fever, which left almost as quickly and inexplicably as it arrived. To the various physicians who examined her, she was “a self-contained enigma, despite a hefty team of specialists offering varied hypotheses.” The author herself was surrounded by doctors—her father, her husband, and others—but she came to see how inexact a science medicine could be. For the creative writer, “this is quickly becoming a story that has nothing to do with grief or planning for grief, or treatment to combat an illness, but rather coping with the uncertainty of health in the dense fog of evolving medicine.” For an attorney experienced in cases of medical malpractice and whose father found his career threatened by an unfounded claim, Silver felt beleaguered by questions that implied guilt or blame—as if she did something to her daughter, dropped her or shook her, and either wouldn’t admit it or couldn’t remember it. Memory itself becomes a reflection of universal uncertainty, as does the disappearance of a Malaysian airliner, Waiting for Godot, and Hamlet’s “To be or not to be.” Ultimately, the author attempts “to control my surroundings as best I can without losing semblance of self, without stopping life, without changing behavior to a point of invisibility. And I create a narrative that evolves daily.” Readers will share Silver’s unease with uncertainty.
The attempt to balance personal trauma with wider cultural reference is a tricky challenge, but this will resonate with anyone who has experienced diagnostic difficulties.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-98144-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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