For connoisseurs of the Lost Generation—a well-tempered biography of the wealthy American couple who knew absolutely everybody, from Hemingway to Fitzgerald to Dos Passos to Picasso, and so on and on. Though Sara and Gerald Murphy both dabbled in the arts, their true genius was for friendship. As Sara once told F. Scott Fitzgerald: “I don—t think the world is a very nice place—And all there seems to be left to do is to make the best of it while we are here, & be VERY grateful for one’s friends—because they are the best there is, & make up for many another thing that is lacking.” Inherited wealth on both sides gave the Murphys the means and leisure to pursue this credo in style across two continents. They were always willing to help artists on the down and out with quiet gifts of money, but it was their ebullient parties that really cemented their reputation. Archibald MacLeish once wrote, “There was a shrine to life wherever they were . . . a kind of revelation of inherent loveliness.” Others were less kind: Hemingway repaid their friendship with slander in A Movable Feast, and they were the model for the Divers in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. The marriage had its strains, including possible affairs, and Gerald’s probable homosexuality, but it was strong enough to survive any number of blows, including the death of two Murphy children. A former Viking Penguin executive editor turned writer, Vaill tries to make up for the secondary celebrity status of the Murphys by infusing their lives with a sorrowing Gatsbyesque grandeur. It’s an admirable, but not quite convincing, effort. Still her tale is told so well and so crammed with incident and revealing thumbnail sketches of the Lost Generation (often on their worst behavior), one tends to forget the relative unimportance of the Murphys themselves. (24 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 29, 1998
ISBN: 0-395-65241-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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