A travelogue filled with historic places, but its personal stories provide its highlights.
A 55-year-old woman and her husband uproot their lives to take a yearlong European tour in Bohr’s debut memoir.
Relatively few people get the opportunity to travel abroad for a significant amount of time, exploring culture, history, and cuisine in different parts of the world. Bohr got not one, but two such chances. Her first, as a graduate student, was a bare-bones, laissez-faire journey, but her second, as a wife and mother who qualified for senior discounts, was a much more carefully planned-out affair. In fact, it took Bohr and her husband, Joe, many years to plan their own “gap year,” in which they hoped to visit more than 20 different countries. Most readers may find their preparations daunting, if not downright terrifying: they developed and executed a calculated savings plan, quit their jobs, and sold half of their worldly belongings. By sticking to their schedule and budget, they managed to see several nations throughout Europe and even took a foray into Africa. The journey, which may seem like an all-but-impossible undertaking, is made very real through Bohr’s frank accounts of their planning, discussions, and decision-making over several years to make their trip a reality. Bohr frequently details the histories of the sites they visited, often providing as much background information as a comprehensive travel guide. Some readers may wish that she had included pictures or illustrations to complement her descriptions, however. At more than 350 pages, this isn’t a memoir to breeze through. Indeed, at times, the lengthy, myriad descriptions and leisurely pace may remind some of watching a friend’s vacation slide show. Bohr shines, however, when she provides glimpses of herself as a whole person, not simply a traveler; for example, her disappointment about their visit to Morocco, where she experienced pushy salespeople, con artists, refuse-filled streets, and dispiriting poverty, is at once visceral and relatable. Her book is an excellent choice for armchair travelers who want to see the sites but are in no particular hurry to do so.
A travelogue filled with historic places, but its personal stories provide its highlights.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63152-820-0
Page Count: 372
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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