A consistently understated, mostly engrossing read.
A British novelist and playwright’s memoir about growing up with a near-deaf, roofing-salesman father.
Although it takes a few chapters for the narrative to gain its footing, this finely detailed remembrance displays subtle wit and powers of perception that magnify every nook and cranny of ordinary life into something extraordinary. Frayn (Travels with a Typewriter: A Reporter at Large, 2009, etc.) begins with his hearing-impaired father’s marriage in the late 1930s. By the time children materialize, the Frayn family has moved from gritty North London to the leafier outland of Ewell, 12 miles outside the city. Frayn’s father pursued the same middle-class suburban dreams of many families at the time, when a respectable suburban home could be purchased for less than £1,000. As the book gains steam, it’s tough to judge whether the author has photographic mental recall, or if his attentiveness to detail can be attributed to a particularly imaginative sense of historical embellishment. Whatever the case, Frayn evokes the sights, sounds and smells of his boyhood as if it had all taken place yesterday. The author’s prose particularly shines when he conjures the dread of V-2 bombings over London during the Blitz. Frayn’s dry, Orwellian sense of humor doesn’t creep into the narrative until he describes the specific ways in which he failed to live up to his father’s hopes for an athletically inclined child—the young author was physically awkward and “slow witted” and didn’t embrace conventional sport until much later in life. As the memoir progresses into Frayn’s adolescent years, the emphasis subtly shifts to his own exploits as a junior intellectual and culture snob. His father’s “fortune,” as one might expect, turns out to be much more important than the kind of inheritance found in a retirement account.
A consistently understated, mostly engrossing read.Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9377-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
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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