A memoir detailing the loss of a mother from ovarian cancer in 1959, when the author was a young teenager, and the shadow the experience cast over her own life. Novelist Furman (Tuxedo Park, 1986, etc.) grew up in New York City, summering in the New Jersey countryside. Her grandmother too died of the disease. As the author says early on here of her adult self, “the medium through which I felt most intensely was still my mother’s death.” In recounting an ordinary enough past, paradise or not, Furman displays an unmemorable prose style, rendering the details of her rites of passage—for example, the beginning of menstruation. Yes, now she is able to connect the onset of her own menarche with the organ that “betrayed” her mother, but the point falls flat. With her father’s remarriage, Furman locates herself in the age-old tale of the unwanted stepchild. An unhappy, self-romanticizing young adult reading Fitzgerald and Chandler, she attempted halfheartedly to injure herself and was confined for a period to a psychiatric hospital. Images linger of the terminally ill mother moving her car from one side of the street to the other in accordance with local regulations, or ordering Chicken Kiev at the Russian Tea Room, but none of this detail seems to matter, to tell us any more about her; even the details of the wording commissioned for her mother’s headstone fail to stir. There are occasional surprising moments of illumination in Furman’s world-weariness. Of an aunt’s recollection of her quarrel with the author’s mother: “I listened to her hopeless recital of the quarrel and the cause, and I wished I never had to hear about it again.” Later, married, raising an adopted son, and living in Texas, Furman underwent the prophylactic removal of her own ovaries. May be of interest to others who’ve lost loved ones to this disease, but too prosaic in the telling to sustain most readers’ engagement. (b&w photos) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-9657468-4-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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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
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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