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ON SUNSET

A MEMOIR

A poignant and eloquent memoir.

A notable novelist and nonfiction writer’s account of the once-wealthy grandparents who raised her and their fall from financial grace.

Received “as an unexpected late-life child” meant to balance out the “misdeeds” of her mother, a beautiful but irresponsible young woman with an insatiable obsession for designer shoes, Harrison (True Crimes: A Family Album, 2016, etc.) lived with her grandparents in a big house on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Though hardly wealthy, they were always impeccably turned out, quietly collecting Blue Chip trading stamps to pay for what they otherwise could not afford to do: “reshingle the roof, replaster the inside of the pool and resurface the driveway.” The family’s real “wealth” resided in the many stories her grandparents told the author and in the many photographs and curios they had collected during their eventful lives. Harrison’s Jewish grandfather, Harry Jacobs, was born poor in London; after a stint as a soldier in World War I, he left England to seek his fortune in Alaska. There, he made a living as a fur trapper and had two sons with a Christian Scientist wife. Later, after her tragic death, he became a traveling salesman. The author’s maternal grandmother, Margaret Sassoon, grew up in Shanghai. A member of the Jewish merchant class, her family once “had a 70 percent monopoly on the entire opium trade” and were labeled the “Rothschilds of the East.” In her youth, Margaret jilted a wealthy businessman her father had chosen for her, turned down marriage proposals from an exiled Russian prince, and flirted with Edward VIII. When Harry and Margaret met in Los Angeles in 1941, both were middle-aged and ready to settle down. The wild-child daughter they had together was the unexpected byproduct of a marriage that began with an impulsive elopement. Blending family history and mythology, anecdotes and photographs, this book is not simply one woman’s open love letter to two magnificently eccentric grandparents; it is also a testament to the enduring power of memory.

A poignant and eloquent memoir.

Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-385-54267-8

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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GENGHIS KHAN AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD

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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