A charmingly eccentric sophomore effort.
A British memoirist and former artist gathers quirky personal essays about embarrassing personal predicaments in which “good intentions f[e]ll short.”
In her often amusing second book, Carew, whose first book, Dadland, won the 2016 Costa Biography Award, unabashedly highlights her unfortunate knack for attracting—or being attracted to—all manner of “mishap and misadventure.” She begins in 1976, the year she “bunked off school [and did] badly in my A-levels.” She flew to Toronto, where she met up with a friend named Ian, with whom she hitchhiked to Texas, where they made plans to travel South America in a VW Beetle they named Horace (“you give names to cars when you’re nineteen”). While on a camping trip in Lake Tahoe, the pair encountered a hulking former mercenary named Animal who showed them “bullet holes in his biceps and the scars on his chest” and made them flee, “too terrified to look back.” In the late 1980s, Carew careened into a long-term marriage with a New Zealander she had only met weeks before in London. Following their union, the pair flew to New Zealand. There, she stumbled into a short-lived career as a waitress and unknowingly ran into actor Sam Neill at a friend’s dinner party. Then the author’s peripatetic inclinations led her to Tunisia and, later, India, where she befriended local guides, one of whom adopted her husband as an “uncle,” tasking him with a proposed visit to the British internet girlfriend he wanted to marry. Carew’s misadventures also included many blunders at home in Britain, where she and her husband eventually settled: playing matchmaker for two “disaster-prone” friends; botching attempts at becoming a poet; and taking up gardening only to find that the act transformed her into a “constant murderer.” As the author chronicles how she all too often “ma[d]e a hash of [things],” Carew’s occasionally outlandish essays serve as witty reminders that laughter is very often the best—and sometimes only—defense against human foibles.
A charmingly eccentric sophomore effort.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78689-407-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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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