Vintage Manguel—a pleasure for his many readers and admirers.
The archbibliophile writes nostalgically of his “last library,” the most recent of a succession of collections that have defined him over a lifetime.
Now director of the National Library in his native Argentina, a post formerly held by Jorge Luis Borges, Manguel (Curiosity, 2015, etc.) professes to a certain discomfort at public libraries: he values the materiality of having one’s own books in which there is no guilt taken in writing in the margins. He wholly endorses Petrarch’s observation, “I feel that I have never enough books.” Departing from Walter Benjamin’s famed essay on “unpacking the library,” Manguel writes of the heartbreaking challenge of boxing up the 35,000 volumes he housed in the Loire Valley of France, “a fantastic creature made up of the several libraries built up and then abandoned, over and over again, throughout my life.” Benjamin had to abandon his own library under more fraught circumstances, a step ahead of the Nazis, but that does not diminish the elegiac quality of Manguel’s slender book, made up of a main essay punctuated by 10 “digressions” that take in love of the book among peoples of the book, Shakespeare, Callimachus, and other tropes of bibliophilia and bibliomania. Borges figures, of course, and his spirit is always close to the main text as well, especially as Manguel takes up residence in the library in Buenos Aires and finds himself not just the book lover and writer of old, but also “accountant, technician, lawyer, architect, electrician, psychologist, diplomat, sociologist, specialist in union politics, technocrat, cultural programmer, and, of course, administrator of actual library matters.” Add philosopher to that list, for the author closes with a meditation on what books have to say about how our lives are lived and governed, with a reminder that they “are reminders of better things, of hope and consolation and compassion.” The tropes are well-worn, but the author brings a fresh hopefulness to the enterprise of books and reading.
Vintage Manguel—a pleasure for his many readers and admirers.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-300-21933-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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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