Creatively and entertainingly written family memoir.
Seymour (The Bugatti Queen: In Search of a Motor-Racing Legend, 2004, etc.) recalls her idiosyncratic father and the unbreakable bond he formed with his country estate.
Located in Nottinghamshire, Thrumpton Hall once belonged to Lord Byron. Young George Seymour, who spent a year there with his childless aunt and uncle when his parents were dispatched to a diplomatic post in Bolivia, was the first child to have lived there in 300 years. Though the Byrons never suggested he would inherit it, the boy vowed Thrumpton Hall would one day belong to him. His daughter’s lively recollection of George’s love affair with the house includes candid reflections on the trials of taking over such a grandiose building, as well as some beautifully descriptive details. Her chronicle of young George’s discovery of the Hall’s hidden spaces, shown to him by a kindly electrician in 1927, is among the book’s many highlights. But the real interest lies in Seymour’s account of her parents’ relations with their daughter and each other. She wonders whether her father married her wealthy mother for the money. Their engagement occurred as the Byrons were considering selling Thrumpton Hall, and later in life George formed close, possibly homosexual bonds with two local men. The author speculates on her father’s overwhelming fondness for these characters, which included sharing beds with them. She records some strained remarks on the topic from her mother but doesn’t draw any firm conclusions. Interjections from the guarded but always beguiling Rosemary Scott Ellis Seymour make a lively addition to the text; she seems to be constantly looking over her daughter’s shoulder as Seymour writes, offering a crusty running commentary. The story takes a sad turn toward the end, as George’s obsession with his house is ultimately overshadowed by an even greater fixation on the ill-fated Robbie.
Creatively and entertainingly written family memoir.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-146656-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
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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