Another elegant memoir from a talented storyteller.
A memoirist reflects on the lessons of her father, a man with an insatiable lust for life.
“ ‘Travel light,’ my father always said. ‘Move fast,’ ” writes Fuller (Quiet Until the Thaw, 2017, etc.). “He followed that advice, practiced what he preached, like it was a key tenet of his personal religion.” The author’s anecdotal tribute to her late father brims with snippets and snatches of Tim Fuller’s whirlwind lifestyle. The first part of the narrative covers their time in Budapest, where she and her mother watched as Tim, stricken with pneumonia, died in a hospital bed. As the text progresses, Fuller peels back layer after layer of the character of her father, a highly textured world traveler who navigated life using his own compass. Leaving his native Britain behind, he set out to fight in the Rhodesian Bush War. After meeting his true love and having two daughters, they settled in Zambia, where Tim acquired a banana plantation along the Zambezi River. The author ably chronicles this tumultuous transition era, with its constantly changing governments and economic instability. But at its heart, the book is an intimate character study of a spontaneity-loving wild man who, in his younger years, amused himself swerving his car toward the “do-gooder” foreign aid workers and clearing life’s hurdles with a good smoke and a whiskey double. “For him, everything was about time,” she writes, “burning through it the way he did.” Over the decades, the wily expat continued etching his colorful legend into Zambezi Valley lore as the author made off for America, now a traveler in her own right. Tasked to come to terms with his physical absence, she sifted through a lifetime of memories in order to pen this celebration of the man whose profound influence helped shape her own worldview. Fuller writes gracefully about embracing grief as an indelible part of the human experience.
Another elegant memoir from a talented storyteller.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59420-674-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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.
