A striking collection of memories that will mystify, enlighten, trouble and amaze.
Memoir as meditation on love and loss, birth and death, good and evil, from PEN Award winner Flynn (Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, 2005, etc.).
In 2007, as the author awaited the birth of his daughter, he became obsessed with the stories of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He felt that his daughter was only as real as the sonogram images of her, the tortured only as real as the now infamous photos of their naked bodies mired in humiliation and pain. This would change. Maeve Lulu was born, and Flynn traveled to Istanbul to witness the testimonies of ex-detainees of Abu Ghraib. Between his daughter’s imminent birth and his confrontation with the tortured, Flynn became lost—“Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point”—and, above all, bewildered—“bewilderment of waking up, my hand on Inez’s belly, as the fine points of waterboarding are debated on public radio.” His only way back was to remember, and so he wrote of memories—some long ago, some fresh wounds, some clear in their meaning, some as elusive as wind. Some memories led to other memories, while others stood alone. He remembered a mother who committed suicide at age 42, a father who was lost to alcohol and then prison at 45, returning to Flynn’s life a ruined man in need of care. He remembered lovers he could not love and feared that when Maeve was born, “I will look at her and not feel a thing.” The author summoned the image of the dragon in Paradise Lost and wondered if it might consume him, the torturers he hates, or both. Flynn recalls and records in a stunningly beautiful cascade of images. In the end, he realizes that only love was real: “The only miracle is now. Lulu is the only miracle.” And that was enough.
A striking collection of memories that will mystify, enlighten, trouble and amaze.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-393-06816-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
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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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BOOK REVIEW
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