A captivating, poetic, difficult-to-categorize book that abundantly showcases the author’s talent for making words dance....
The first publication of a long-lost work by revered Appalachian writer Dykeman (1920-2006).
Written in the early 1940s, just after her graduation from Northwestern University, Dykeman’s observations on nature display her charming ability to remember small joys: sitting on a rock near the creek watching life floating by over the creek bed, a luna moth in flight, the sounds and feel of the country. Her intimacy with water is evident as her descriptions transport readers into the moment: rain, puddles, mists, walking in damp earth, and even the smell of newness after a flood. Her stories of the first 14 years of her life evoke the innocence of childhood before we lose the sense of incredibility and uniqueness of things. Predating Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring by almost 20 years, Dykeman’s work bemoans the negative changes to nature: the housing booms and the losses of woodlands, habitats, and, mostly, solitude, something her father introduced to her as a singular freedom. A person who lives with nature is the only truly real person, compelled only by natural laws—laws so primal and universal that they also rule the lives of plants and animals. In addition to the author’s abiding affinity for nature, she has a beautiful, lyrical writing style. Throughout her life, she ached to satisfy her imagination not with facts but with the feel of things. Dykeman grew up near Asheville, North Carolina, and her father, 60 when she was born, was her light, her guide, and her muse. He and her mother, more than 35 years younger, took their only child for walks in their woods, to the creeks, hollows, and meadows, reveling in everything they saw—and it shows in this enjoyable series of reflections.
A captivating, poetic, difficult-to-categorize book that abundantly showcases the author’s talent for making words dance. Anyone who has lived in the countryside, or wished they had, will enjoy Dykeman’s celebration of nature.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4696-2914-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
