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MOTHER TONGUE

AN AMERICAN LIFE IN ITALY

A poignant and poetic memoir of an American woman's life in Parma, Italy. In 1981, less than a year after her marriage to an Italian biology professor, Wilde-Menozzi (with her six-year-old daughter) followed her husband back to his native city of Parma. As a poet, short-story writer, and translator, Wilde-Menozzi is almost painfully conscious of the long and glorious tradition of expatriates who took root in Italy: The spirit of that great exile James Joyce seems, in particular, to pervade the book. In some ways, her work is reminiscent of the English writer Tim Parks, who settled in Verona and wrote Italian Neighbors (1992) and An Italian Education (1995) about his life there. But while Parks writes with ironic detachment, Wilde-Menozzi is passionate, sensuous, even fierce, whether dealing with the initial dilemma of relinquishing her freedom and following her husband to Italy (the words ``follow him,'' she writes, ``link me to all the Ruths that ever were'') or comparing her own ``bland and boring'' childhood with the chaotic intensity of her husband's family. Life, death, politics, language, art, books, food, and love commingle on the page. The author's sojourn in Italy becomes the catalyst for intensive soul-searching, which refracts off the page in marvelous images: She speaks of coffee reaching ``a noisy orgasm in the espresso pot.'' Discussing bread's centrality in Italian life, she celebrates it as ``a sacred gift''; whether it is ``fresh, stale, hanging on, filling bitter hunger, nourishing hopes, crusty and chewable,'' bread is ``sometimes all there is.'' Evocative and moving. (27 b&w photos, not seen)

Pub Date: June 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-86547-501-6

Page Count: 373

Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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GENGHIS KHAN AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD

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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