Self-aware and committed, Brady offers an extended pep talk for women facing crises of their own, as well as a personal...
The spirited autobiography of the noted gun-control advocate and onetime Republican loyalist.
A good fight, indeed: Brady emerges from these pages as nothing if not a scrapper, unwilling to give in to the raft of bad luck that’s been her lot. First, of course, there was the shooting of her husband Jim, brain-damaged and confined to a wheelchair, thanks to would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley. Second was the slow discovery that their young son Scott suffered from sensory integration problems, which made him “something of a handful, to put it mildly.” Third, and one of the most affecting moments of Brady’s narrative, was her long and ongoing battle against lung cancer, brought on, she admits, by years of smoking and a once-insurmountable addiction to tobacco. Chapter by chapter, she meets all these tests head-on, writing of her work in agitating for national gun-control legislation, in helping Scott and Jim go about the difficult business of daily life, and of wrestling with her own doubts and shortcomings. Her mood is largely cheerful and even homey (“We always have beef for Christmas dinner”), though she fires off a few zingers here and there (“Charlton Heston, who later would become my chief adversary . . . struck me—I remember it vividly—as a pompous ass”). Brady tends toward platitude, confining her reflections on matters such as the Hinckley attempt to easily digested morsels: “God only knows what demons drove him to do what he did.” But that’s beside the point, and by the end, all but the most cynical reader will be rooting for Brady—and, likely, for the causes she espouses.
Self-aware and committed, Brady offers an extended pep talk for women facing crises of their own, as well as a personal memoir—and it works on both levels.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-58648-105-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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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