Thoughtful and well-paced—an illuminating study of the fine but now overlooked poet.
Lucid biography of the eminent English poet, forever on the outside and never quite at home in his own time.
Egremont (Balfour, not reviewed) agrees with Ronald Knox that Siegfried Sassoon was “predominantly ‘a First War man,’ ” profoundly shaped by his experiences in the trenches of France and Belgium. Sassoon was wounded in battle but did not die, unlike his friend Wilfred Owen, who came to be considered the great English poet of the Great War. Sassoon grumbled about this, ungallantly; annoyed that an American anthology of WWI verse had more of Owen’s poems than of his, Sassoon wrote to Edmund Blunden that “the canonisation of Wilfred is still in full swing.” Sassoon was used to feeling snubbed; he was Jewish and gay at a time when British society had little tolerance for such things. As a teenager, he “wanted to conform and from this came affection, sometimes love, for a type he was drawn to all his life: the man of character, not intellect.” So it was for most of his life, though in the late 1920s Sassoon was drawn into the preppy social circle surrounding the wealthy aesthete Stephen Tennant, the so-called Bright Young Thing who provided Evelyn Waugh with satirical ammunition for his early novels. Sassoon was deeply in love with Tennant, but the relationship was turbulent, and in 1933 he married a woman named Hester Gatty. The marriage was not successful, and Sassoon soon “began to loathe her often reasonable demands for love and closeness”; now even more conflicted, he grew withdrawn, conservative and even puritanical, a champion of good-old-days England, old-fashioned in his own time and ever less popular with contemporary readers. His death certificate referred to him as “poet and author retired,” while others remembered him as a “desperately conventional man” who could never be as free as he wished.
Thoughtful and well-paced—an illuminating study of the fine but now overlooked poet.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-26375-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
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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