Well written, though without the broader appeal of, say, Rick Atkinson or Richard Overy; a minor but interesting take on a...
An American combat doctor’s memories of war, as filtered through his novelist daughter (The Art of Absence, 2011, etc.).
From an Italian immigrant family, Army Cpt. Bart Passanante found himself “aimed in the opposite direction” of his parents’ passage earlier in the century, bound as a military doctor to the war theaters of Africa, Italy, and eventually France and Germany. Armed with a trove of letters—more than 1,365 pages—from Bart to her mother, Bertie, written “almost daily in an attempt to span the jagged cleft the war had sliced into their marriage,” the latter-day Passanante explores her father’s recollection of events and retraces his steps on some parts of the journey (“When I first read Bart’s description of his days in the boxcar to Algeria, I had no doubts that I, too, wanted to travel there”). The author takes clear pleasure in her father’s mastery of English, overcoming the linguistic gulf by which immigrants are easily sorted into the category of “Other,” and she has a good eye for the telling detail and for when to quote directly and when to paraphrase. Her father tends to understatement, but sometimes he lets slip just how dangerous his situation is, as when he is preparing to board the landing craft for the invasion of France on D-Day: “Somehow, I’ve become fatalistic about the whole thing,” he writes. “I’m not as scared as I thought I was going to be.” Though the daughter’s commentary is less immediate, there are some fine moments, too, such as her meeting a Frenchwoman who, wounded in crossfire, may have been treated by Dr. Passanante decades earlier. As she writes after their tender encounter, “in the way that I missed my father in the months before he died…when his mind had already been spirited away by Alzheimer’s disease, I missed her already.”
Well written, though without the broader appeal of, say, Rick Atkinson or Richard Overy; a minor but interesting take on a major conflict.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8142-5424-0
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Mad Creek/Ohio State Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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
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