A heartwarming account, ripe for discussion in women’s book clubs and women’s studies classes.
An in-depth look at the enduring bond of friendship among a tightly knit group of middle-class Midwestern women born in the early 1960s.
Through his popular “Moving On” column in the Wall Street Journal, which focuses on transitions in women’s friendships, Zaslow (co-author: The Last Lecture, 2008) was introduced to the women featured here. The author briefly profiles all 11, but avoids an overcrowded portrait by focusing on four: strait-laced Marilyn, fun-loving Karla, outspoken Kelly and Sheila, whose death at 22 remains mysterious. The author spent time with them, looked at their photo albums, read their teenage notes and diaries, met their families and pored over the reply-all e-mails that have kept the group in close touch for the past decade. Zaslow also attended their annual reunion in 2007, an event he vividly recounts here. He records their happy reminiscences of high-school hijinks, their sometimes bittersweet recollections of adolescent misadventures, their connections with each other as their lives took separate paths and their continued warm support for each other as major events—marriages, births, divorces, deaths—impacted their lives. When breast cancer struck two of them in middle age, Zaslow shows the emotional help and encouragement they received from the others. Although his portrait of the group is mostly positive, he does not overlook the negative aspects of adolescent exclusivity, revealing how other classmates viewed them as a snobbish clique. Zaslow also reports briefly on research that has highlighted the difference between male bonding and female bonding, and the importance of friendship in the lives of women.
A heartwarming account, ripe for discussion in women’s book clubs and women’s studies classes.Pub Date: April 21, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-592-40445-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
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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