“Love the One You’re With” could be the theme song for these poignant, multilayered, pitch-perfect slices of life filled...
Love and loss form myriad combinations in these quirky, funny, ironic, and heartbreaking tales: a third collection from storywriter and novelist Thurm (The Clairvoyant, 1997, etc.).
A rabbi’s wife of ten years announces in front of his entire congregation that she’s leaving him, but when a new woman tempers his desperate yearning, the wife calls to ask for another chance. This dilemma, posed by opening story “Moonlight,” is merely a teaser for the stunning work that follows. “Earthbound” shows Walter grappling with his love for 19-year-old daughter Sunny, who has two children by a high-school sweetheart and now dates a loser who works in a pet shop. Mothers and daughters go at it in “Passenger” (12-year-old Lacey leaves her teacher/cab-driver mom to visit her dad and his new family in California) and in “Jumping Ship” (11-but-looks-14-year-old Noelle cares about nothing except calling her boyfriend while she and her single mother are visiting the grandparents in Florida). Mrs. Sugarman has paid for “Housecleaning” to welcome her asthmatic husband home from the hospital, but the odd couple she’s engaged arrive with their precocious child, fight bitterly, and reveal the most intimate details of their lives, forcing their employer to face her deepest desires. In “Personal Correspondence,” Sam hires lesbian Honey Rose to write thank-you notes after his wife leaves and winds up applying for the position of fathering her child. Thurm finds love everywhere and embraces all relationships: among parents and children, husbands and wives, friends, strangers, and lovers. Her protagonists are bad luck Charlies, likable and empathetic, fumbling through seemingly ordinary lives that Thurm’s deft hand raises to the extraordinary.
“Love the One You’re With” could be the theme song for these poignant, multilayered, pitch-perfect slices of life filled with humanity and hope despite frequent betrayals and abandonments.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-883285-22-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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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