A joy for her many fans, old and new.
An exuberant celebration of life by America's favorite octogenarian sex guru.
Westheimer (Dr. Ruth's Guide for the Alzheimer's Caregiver, 2012, etc.) examines the basis for her resiliency and irrepressible joie de vivre despite the trauma of having been separated from her family at age 10 and the vicissitudes of age. As one of the last German Jewish children to escape the Holocaust, she was sent to live in a Swiss orphanage. Faced with the reality that her family had been killed and an ultimatum from the Swiss to leave the country, she went to Israel. She moved to France when the Sorbonne offered her an opportunity to pursue a higher education and then to the United States, where she earned a doctorate at Columbia University Teacher’s College. She has been married three times, with two ending in divorce and the third with the untimely death of her husband. Her secret for maintaining a joyful outlook on life is not in suppressing the negative but not in dwelling on it, either. Westheimer also writes about how she was grand marshal in New York City’s German-American Steuben Parade. After all, she quips, Hitler “committed suicide; meanwhile, I'm living life to the fullest.” More seriously, not to have accepted the invitation would have been like saying, “all Germans are inherently evil.” Although she has had phenomenal success on radio and TV, her role as Dr. Ruth came about by chance when she was in her 50s as an offshoot of successful guest appearances. The author prides herself most on her academic career. For many years, she taught graduate students at Princeton and Yale, and she currently teaches a course at Columbia Teacher’s College on family and media. Her warmth, wit, and wisdom shine through this lively account of a life well-lived.
A joy for her many fans, old and new.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4778-2960-8
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Amazon Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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IN THE NEWS
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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