Thorough, intelligent and respectful, but more bite would have released more of Updike’s blood.
A sympathetic, full-meal-deal biography—life, literary works, reputation—of John Updike (1932–2009), who was considered by many to be the most talented of his generation.
Former New York Observer books editor Begley (Certitude: A Profusely Illustrated Guide to Blockheads and Bullheads, Past and Present, 2009, etc.) erects his formidable edifice on a sturdy foundation of research and convention. He interviewed the relevant relatives and friends, trod the ground in Pennsylvania (Updike’s state of birth and youth), Massachusetts and elsewhere, and read all the works of Updike’s most prolific career. Begley begins in Berks County, Pa., and shows us Updike’s town-and-country boyhood, a time filled with reading and drawing and observing. His father was a public school teacher (see Updike’s The Centaur); his mother, a homemaker and writer (she published in the New Yorker—like her son and grandson—and wrote novels). We see Updike’s stellar schoolboy academic record and his matriculation at Harvard, where he earned a spot on the Harvard Lampoon staff and where he displayed the astonishing work ethic, creativity and precocity that would—while still in his 20s—earn him a staff position on the New Yorker and a lifelong publishing relationship with Alfred A. Knopf. Begley also shows us how Updike repeatedly mined his own experiences, populating his fiction with people like those in his own social circle (including his wives and many lovers). Perhaps too frequently, the author summarizes and explicates numerous of his works (including Updike’s poems and essays) and throughout displays a patent admiration, even affection, for his subject. He suggests that Updike’s conservative social positions (on civil rights, on Vietnam) were sometimes born of a desire to be contrarian rather than of actual conviction.
Thorough, intelligent and respectful, but more bite would have released more of Updike’s blood.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-189645-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
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