A heartfelt and rich narrative tapestry.
A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist explores her charming but mysterious father’s life and family history.
Jestingly called “the Duke of Villanova” by Scott (A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother, 2011) and her family, Robert Scott grew up the heir to a “middling American fortune” built by the author’s grandfather. Yet Robert, who did not have access to the trusts that “went to the oldest generation,” insisted on spending money he earned—first as a lawyer then, later, as president of the Philadelphia Museum of Art—on maintaining a family mansion he did not own. Drawing on family letters and conversations, her father’s journals, and her own vivid memories, the author probes the secrets of her family. As Scott chronicles, Robert’s grandfather, who was reported to have died of illness during World War I, actually committed suicide out of fear of being publicly humiliated for “a bender involving a woman and booze.” Robert’s beautiful socialite mother, Helen, was the inspiration for the character Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story, and his literary-minded father, Edgar, consorted with members of the Algonquin Round Table before founding a Philadelphia stockbrokerage. But for all their glamour, Robert’s parents remained a sadly “intermittent presence” in the life of a son who would later say that he had been “raised by Irish cooks and maids.” Reading Robert’s journals—discovered nearly a decade after his death—the author discovered that her outwardly breezy father suffered a deep existential anguish that came out in his lifelong addiction to alcohol. The family story the author tells is fascinating for the painful personal legacies it uncovers. At the same time, it is also compelling for the parallels it draws between an earlier age of inequality and our own and the questions it raises about how contemporary stories of new-rich families “will play out, one hundred years hence.”
A heartfelt and rich narrative tapestry.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59463-419-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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
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