An emotionally draining but haunting document of human cruelty, kindness and survival.
Muckraking memoir exposes Russia’s nightmarish orphan-care system.
Aided by British journalist Philps, Lahutsky recounts his experiences in the “children’s gulag,” a Stalinist-era relic that operates to this day. Now a high-school student living with his adoptive mother in Pennsylvania, at the time the book opens Lahutsky was a toddler named Vanya, abandoned by his birth mother and diagnosed with cerebral palsy. He was sent to the titular orphanage, a decrepit human warehouse whose head doctor was a superstitious peasant rather than a medical professional. Children with physical disabilities like Vanya’s were routinely declared mentally retarded by Russian authorities, then consigned to orphanages where therapy was nonexistent. But Baby House 10 was the Taj Mahal compared to the internat (asylum) to which Vanya was later shuttled to spend the rest of his life. A hellhole in which children were sedated and left in steel-barred cribs soiled with their own urine and feces, the internat spurred reporter Philps, his wife and some humane Russian caregivers to make heroic efforts to save Vanya. The book details his tortuous ordeal with the Russian state bureaucracy and an aborted adoption by a British family, as well as his ultimate connection with a loving American mother. None of his setbacks snuffed out Vanya’s indefatigable resilience, which was his salvation and comprises the most remarkable part of his story.
An emotionally draining but haunting document of human cruelty, kindness and survival.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-57697-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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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