A book of modest charms just short enough not to outstay its welcome.
An American family discovers there’s no cure for Anglophilia like living in London.
This slight comic memoir oversells its premise, as the 1960s England recounted by Academy Chicago president and editorial director Miller (Uncollecting Cheever: The Family of John Cheever vs. Academy Chicago Publishers, 1998, etc.) is far from swinging. The story is set in 1965, but Beatlemania and Carnaby Street are at the periphery; at the forefront is a drab, provincial, day-to-day London that seems permanently stuck in the past. When her husband, Jordan, moved her and their three children to London—in hopes of salvaging what was left of the British branch of his business—Miller, with a freshly minted degree in English literature, looked forward to soaking up centuries of literary culture. Instead, life in this new old world became a series of daily torments. The landlady of their rented town house left the place in poor repair; sheets and cookware were missing, and bathroom leaks and clogs became all too apparent. The city rubbed the family the wrong way; service personnel arrived at the worst time or not at all, store and restaurant staffers were indifferent to customers, and minor requests transformed into major ordeals. The locals were boors who fetishize the queen and lecture Americans on their shortcomings. “We’re five hundred years ahead of you, you see,” explains one new acquaintance. “We’ve had more time to become civilized.” The book is at its funniest when Miller lets comic events speak for themselves, but the wit is often forced. The author’s memories aren’t so much interesting in themselves as they are buoyed by her pseudo-drollery. “[T]he English, they’ll do you every time,” says the family’s Irish cleaning lady, which is funnier the first time she says it than the tenth.
A book of modest charms just short enough not to outstay its welcome.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0897337434
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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
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