Delightfully bighearted reading.
An essayist and Emmy-winning literary talk show host muses on the ups and downs of her life as a daughter, mother, career woman, and wife.
Philpott (Penguins with People Problems, 2015), who hosts A Word on Words on Nashville Public Television, opens this collection of inviting autobiographical essays with a meditation on the titular phrase. Her son devised it as a bored 6-year-old playing in her home office, but she later saw the words as perfectly capturing “that universal adult experience: the identity crisis.” In the appealing essays that follow, Philpott explores episodes from her life when she experienced identity shifts, both large and small, that forced some form of personal “recalibration.” She begins by examining how the perfectionism that followed her from a childhood defined by good grades and a desire to please came up against the adult realization that humans are “limited by the bounds of what we understand to be right.” In “Good Job,” Philpott details her first post-college/early-career awakening. As the author clearly demonstrates, the rewards toward which she had been taught to run “like a mouse on a wheel” simply did not exist. Yet her tendency to impose an ideal version of reality onto her actual experiences continued, as she admits in “The Expat Concept.” When her husband’s job took him to Dublin, for example, she put more time into creating the perfect wardrobe and envisioning glamorous photo-ops than “into figuring out how we would eat.” It was only during a major midlife crisis that the author came face to face with the fact that the perfect existence she insisted on creating—despite all she knew about letting go of personal and social expectations—had left her feeling like a depressed “human traffic jam.” Warm, candid, and wise, Philpott’s book is both an extended reflection on the pressures of being female and a survivor’s tale about finding contentment by looking within and learning to be herself.
Delightfully bighearted reading.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982102-80-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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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