According to Bradford (The Reluctant King, 1990, etc.), poet, writer, and art critic Sacheverell (``Sachie'') Sitwell (1897-1988) formed—along with his brother, Osbert, and sister, Edith—a cult of his own, albeit one that was self-involved, effete, and aesthetically and politically out of tune with his times. Conceived in ``ritual deliberation'' to satisfy the dynastic aspirations of their father, Sir George Sitwell, the siblings grew up as isolated eccentrics in their ancestral estate in Derbyshire. Physically impressive as adults—each was over six feet tall with a bony face and pronounced nose—the three apparently wrote in order to compensate for emotional deprivations. They were so fiercely possessive of one another that Sachie's marriage at age 26 to an 18-year-old Canadian was a family trauma. The union produced two sons, to whom neither parent seemed closely attached; many exotic travels (and books about them); dinners; debts; and affairs, including Sachie's last one, with ballet dancer Moira Shearer. Meanwhile, Sachie was an influential art critic who wrote in the tradition of Ruskin, interpreting architecture, primarily baroque and gothic. His poetry was voluminous but mannered and out of touch with the social and political issues, psychological intensity, and experimentation that characterized the work of Virginia Woolf, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, and other illuminati of his generation. Sachie was attacked by F.R. Leavis, Geoffrey Grigson, and Wyndham Lewis, whose parody, The Apes of God, ridiculed his anachronistic values and right-wing politics—but his circle included Harold Acton, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, and T.S. Eliot, who called the siblings the ``Shitwells.'' In spite of numerous interviews with the living and research among the dead, Bradford's approach seems as detached, impersonal, and aloof as Sachie himself—a man who may have had no secrets, or who perhaps could hide them even from himself. (Sachie shared the family talent for being photographed, wonderfully represented here in portraits by, among others, his good friend Sir Cecil Beaton.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-374-26789-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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