A graceful, wonderfully written memoir that’s sure to please Ansay’s fiction fans—as well as readers of confessional and...
After four novels (Vinegar Hill, 1994, etc.) and one story collection, Ansay debuts in nonfiction with a thoughtful memoir of affliction and redemption.
Ansay trained throughout childhood and adolescence to become a concert pianist, but by the time she was 20 her ambition was thwarted by a paralyzing illness that left her unable to walk—or to play. Doctors were mystified by her condition, which may have had something to do with an on-and-off bout of strep throat but certainly wasn’t helped by a punishing routine of musical training. (“Injuries were commonplace,” she writes, “particularly among pianists, particularly among female pianists. A girl one floor down from me fractured her arm landing a Beethoven chord.”) Confined to a wheelchair for the past 15 years, Ansay has transferred her energies from music to writing, becoming a favorite of Oprah and midwestern booksellers alike. Her memoir touches on these matters, but it spends greater time exploring, with considerable grace and clarity, matters of the spirit. Purgatorial lessons such as hers are taught, she writes, because “God is simply testing you, testing the condition of your Faith.” As she revisits her own suffering, she recalls that of her mother, who grew up working in the fields before the age of seven but spent her Sundays singing in the choir. Though she occasionally slips into self-indulgence, Ansay shies from self-pity. Indeed, most of her madeleines are recalled in fine humor, as when she recounts her first childhood lesson in learning how to lie: “At school, if somebody asked what I’d had for breakfast, and I’d had eggs, I’d say, ‘Cereal.’ Why? Just because I could.” That’s an essential talent for a writer, of course, and Ansay has cultivated hers well.
A graceful, wonderfully written memoir that’s sure to please Ansay’s fiction fans—as well as readers of confessional and inspirational literature.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-17286-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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.
