A fertile trove that needs a stronger framework.
Letters revealing the enduring friendship of two “beat chicks.”
In 1990, poet, children’s book author, and memoirist Jones (Writing/New School; Doing Seventy, 2007, etc.) published How I Became Hettie Jones, which recalled “sixties bohemia” and her marriage to poet and activist LeRoi Jones (later, Amiri Baraka) and featured figures such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Joyce Johnson. “Scholars have tended to heroicize ‘beat chicks’ who lived through that scene and got out alive,” she writes; her memoir was both testimony and corrective. Urged by friends to continue her story, Jones has chosen to select from 40 years of correspondence with Helene Dorn (1927-2004), an artist and ex-wife of poet Ed Dorn. Like poems, Jones says, letters “offer voices.” However, readers unfamiliar with the writers would be well-served by contextualizing information, including a more detailed introduction to the volume and to each of the 17 chapters. Jones does provide some narrative linking the letters but not enough to round out a coherent story of each woman’s life. What does emerge is an inkling of the friendship, understanding, and empathy between the two women who saw themselves as “Babes in Boyland.” Both were raising their children alone, and both struggled financially and artistically. Jones, living in New York, had more opportunities: she taught writing, gave readings, and made publishing connections. Dorn, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, seems more isolated. Some letters are just a few lines, some appear to be excerpted, and some were sent as emails, a challenging medium, especially for Dorn. The letters include mundane events such as car and computer trouble; opinions about books, movies, and art shows; gossip; commiseration about illness, housing troubles, and the challenges of aging; and, occasionally, politics. In 1988, for example, to support Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, Jones vowed to buy no more grapes. In 1989, she describes her experience at a pro-choice rally in Washington. Both were overcome with dismay after 9/11.
A fertile trove that needs a stronger framework.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8223-6146-6
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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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