In this exhaustive work, Dubliners and Joyce scholars Jackson and Costello (the latter the author of James Joyce, 1993) portray the Joyces’ paterfamilias as a colorful figure from a fading world, and his orbit as a priceless source for much of James’s fiction. Write Jackson and Costello, “in a real sense John Stanislaus Joyce is the ur-author of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.” A supporter of Irish nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell and Irish home rule, John Stanislaus Joyce (1849—1931) is described as his son’s primary literary inspiration and as providing the context to almost everything he wrote. The only son of James Augustine Joyce and Ellen O’Connell, John entered Queen’s College, Cork, in 1867, but he would not complete his higher education. He began his professional career as an accountant in Cork. Money was a lifelong struggle; though he was never quite officially bankrupt, the family moved residences, as the authors show, with shocking frequency, and John changed employers constantly. A prideful father, John watched his eldest (and favored) son, James, abandon his medical studies in Paris for journalism and later fiction writing. James, they say, was always “eager to draw on his father’s memories and extravagant idioms,” including a deathbed interview arranged to create lasting documentation of John’s world. (James also built up character sketches in his notes, some reproduced here, for use in his fiction.) Jackson and Costello are likewise determined to locate, or at least observe, James’s countless real-life sources—names, places, characters, anecdotes—in his father’s “voluminous” life and milieu. They recount the aging John’s bestowing custodianship of the Joyce family portraits to his son in a symbolic passing of the family torch. Later, in Zurich, James would “turn memory into literature.” A readable biography, undeniably a useful contribution to Joyce studies, though overlong and over-detailed for most casual fans. (16 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18599-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
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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