A humorless journey of self-discovery marked by annoying pretensions and an of superiority.
A middle-aged yuppie’s overwritten account of her discovery that there’s more to life than a prestigious job.
As Hirsch (A Home in the Heart of the City, 1998) approached her 40s, she began to feel dissatisfied with her achievement-driven lifestyle. The sudden death of her younger brother sharpened her desire for a change, and her experience of pregnancy and the birth of her first child provided further impetus. Her search for a “Sabbath life” (meaning one that is “varied, fruitful, and, at day’s end rich in wisdom and peace”) led her to the library, to nature and gardening, to making good soup, trying various handicrafts, exploring her community, and connecting with other women. An admirer of Virginia Woolf, she set out to create a room of her own, but she realized that there was something stagy about her vision of it as a home to seedpods, birds’ nests, paintbrushes and good, thick paper, a basket for yarns, and a space on the floor for the baby to sit and play in the sunlight. She found analogies with life in the seasons of her backyard garden, in the structure of an apple she was slicing, and in a fruit compote she was aging and blending. There’s a good deal of high-flown rhetoric here—about finding one’s “self,” about harmony, spiritual growth, balance, wholeness, and the wisdom of the body—as she imagines herself and other (usually quite politically correct and aesthetically aware) women creating a “new reality.”
A humorless journey of self-discovery marked by annoying pretensions and an of superiority.Pub Date: April 18, 2001
ISBN: 0-86547-598-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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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