A heart-rending remembrance that lays bare complex familial relationships.
A woman reconnects with her biological parents and addresses her challenging relationship with the father who raised her in this debut memoir.
Banis was born in Boston in the summer of 1968 and was immediately given up for adoption. Her adoptive father, Diederich, was a German who experienced the horrors of World War II as a child. Lilia, her adoptive mother, hailed from an affluent Swiss family. As an infant, Banis lived briefly in Switzerland before her parents moved with her to America. Throughout her life, she writes, her relationship with her father was strained. On a fishing trip during her adolescence, she says that he remarked to her, “I should have adopted a boy.” In high school, Banis met Charles, whom she would later marry despite her parents’ disapproval; the couple went on to have two children. The author’s relationship with Diederich became increasingly fraught following the death of her mother from ovarian cancer. A new chapter in her life began when she met and bonded with her biological mother, Elizabeth Vornholdt, who gave her the information to track down Johnathan Bennett, her birth father. Soon after, her adoptive dad’s health began to rapidly deteriorate, and her birth mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Banis’ prose transports readers to dark places—none more so than the hospital room of her dying parent, which she describes in visceral detail: “After my dad fell into a predictable rhythm of breathing, I leaned over him and quietly told him I loved him and that I appreciated everything he ever did for me.” Her matter-of-fact style also has the power to charm, as when she describes clumsily dropping her cellphone after receiving her first message from her biological dad: “I stepped into the street after it as if my life depended on it. The light for me to cross was red, and a taxi nearly hit me because I lurched out in front of it.” Despite a smattering of comedic interludes, though, this is a desperately sad story. Still, its message is one of hope and forgiveness, which will surely offer strength to those facing similar challenges.
A heart-rending remembrance that lays bare complex familial relationships.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5043-9758-2
Page Count: 216
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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