Wise, humane and always insightful.
A well-organized collection of a beloved, award-winning writer’s nonfiction essays about her personal and literary lives.
Most readers know Patchett (State of Wonder, 2011, etc.) for her richly imaginative fiction. But before she found success as a novelist, she supported herself by writing nonfiction for a diverse variety of magazines, including Seventeen, Mercedes Benz Magazine and Bridal Guide. In this book, Patchett gathers 22 essays published between 1997 and 2012. What she ultimately produces is a text that is part meditation on the writing life and part literary memoir. From an early age, the Los Angeles native knew she wanted to be a writer, but she would be an adult before she realized that, in addition to making art, storytellers “also [had] to make a living.” After stints as a cook, waitress and teacher, she discovered that writing nonfiction could pay her bills. It would only be much later that she understood how writing nonfiction had transformed her into “a workhorse,” abolished her ego and impacted the future readers of her novels in ways she never expected. Patchett also reflects on her literary successes, as well as on the controversy surrounding Truth & Beauty (2004), which explores the emotionally intense relationship she had with fellow Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate Lucy Grealy. The personal essays reflect a wide range of experiences. In one, she reflects on the rocky childhood that led her away from LA and on to Nashville. In another, she reflects on her failed first marriage and second successful one. Patchett also shares stories of how she learned to appreciate opera, qualified for the LA police academy and unexpectedly became part owner of an independent bookstore. Readable and candid, Patchett’s collection is a joyful celebration of life, love and the written word.
Wise, humane and always insightful.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-223667-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
PROFILES
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.
