Arresting, thought-provoking, frightening, glorious.
Long-time literary journalist Atlas (Bellow, 2000, etc.) contemplates life and death in 11 poignant essays that chronicle the trials of growing older.
Originally published in the New Yorker, this “personal history” has universal implications. “Mom and Dad,” “Home,” “Money,” “The Body”—who doesn't have a book’s worth of thoughts and anxieties about any one of these biggies? Discussing events and relationships we all experience, the 50-plus author presents himself as an everyman complete with wife, kids, and a career that’s had its ups and downs. He can’t help but yearn for the American dream of stability, money, and happiness, but more than that he wants to understand how life works and what it all means. Atlas tells the stories of his family, colleagues, and friends, a well-educated urban crowd who should by all rights be happier than most, if money and education are the measures. But it ain’t necessarily so. What makes My Life outstanding is the author’s gift for peeling the veneer from the ordinary to reveal the significance beneath; his tendency toward the melancholic can be forgiven when it comes paired with his incisive observations. His son’s tennis prowess, for instance, prompts reflections on the gradual deterioration of his body, as well as a recollection of the day not so long ago when Atlas beat his own old man for the first time. “Failure” takes as its departure point the time just a few years ago when Atlas was fired from a job, but the essay moves on to consider the mystery of what success means, and how we all torture ourselves over the wrong-headed choices we’ve made. These painfully honest pieces are remarkable when taken in smaller doses, but reading them all at one sitting could be a body blow for those of a darker disposition.
Arresting, thought-provoking, frightening, glorious.Pub Date: March 3, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-019629-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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
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