Totally engaging and surprisingly frank. For women concerned about facing a similar future, disturbing yet somehow...
A gripping portrayal of how the lives of a wife and her husband were forever changed when the husband incurred permanent brain damage.
Feminist author Shulman (A Good Enough Daughter, 1999, etc.)—a fiercely independent woman whose marriage was based on autonomy and freedom and for whom privacy and time for her writing were paramount—was suddenly deprived of both when her husband Scott’s traumatic brain injury left him dependent and demented, yet still loving and lovable. Within the details of the accident and the aftermath—a ten-foot fall in the middle of the night on a small island off the coast of Maine, his rescue, his subsequent time in hospitals and rehab and his return home—the author interweaves the story of their unusual romance. It began with a teenage crush in 1950, followed by a 34-year hiatus in which each married, had children and divorced (she twice). Their relationship resumed in 1984, and by the time of the accident they had been together for some 20 years. Her early misunderstanding of the doctors’ prognosis—she thought he would return to normal in one year—was gradually replaced by the stark realization that while physical improvements in strength and mobility were possible, his mental capacities, including his short-term memory, were gone. How she dealt with this shattering knowledge and managed his care, as well as how their relationship changed, comprise the core of this compelling love story. Although she rejoiced in his small triumphs and basked in his warmth and charm, the author includes the frightening episodes when he disappeared or became so hostile and violent that she called the police.
Totally engaging and surprisingly frank. For women concerned about facing a similar future, disturbing yet somehow reassuring.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-374-27815-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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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