A lifetime selection of Hemingway's professional non-fiction as a reporter and columnist, this is a long-awaited book in the hardcover canon of the century's most imitated and most envied writer, and the man who built the tallest legend. His perfectionism seldom wavers in these pieces, though the later selections from Look magazine are in the garrulous Papa manner. The selections are in five categories. His four years (1920-1924) as a "Canadian" reporter for the Toronto Star find his famous tight style taking shape through Paris and the capitals. (For this period, Hemingway's work is better represented in Dell paperback— Hemingway: The Wild Years—which has forty-eight stories in addition to the twenty-five in By Line However, By-Line contains "Christmas on the Roof of the World" which the Dell book does not and which is the most moving, exciting story in either book.) The second period (1933-1939) contains his columns on fishing, bulls and the Spanish Civil War. While the style is still great, the Papa figure intrudes, not unpleasantly, and the stories are less tensely organized. The third period is high-powered reportage on the Civil War for North American News Alliance, and the fourth section finds "Ernie Hemorrhold, the poor man's Pyle" going into the Normandy beachhead on D-Day for Collier's. The last section is potpourri from the big slicks. By-Line contains dozens of incidents later novelized or used in short stories. Perhaps the century's greatest travel writer, his European catalogue of winds, breezes, trees, funiculars, rivers, lakes, wines and fiestas are nonpareil. As Lillian Ross might have put it, Hem feller have heap big magic.
Pub Date: May 29, 1967
ISBN: 0684839059
Page Count: 489
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1967
BOOK REVIEW
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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