A somber, moving tribute to a life of ideals and struggle.
A beautifully crafted, searing memoir by the Chilean American writer about his dispersion and homelessness after fleeing the military junta of General Pinochet.
As a deeply engaged supporter of President Salvadore Allende, Dorfman (Desert Memories: Journeys Through the Chilean North, 2004, etc.) was banished from Chile when Pinochet seized power in 1973, assassinating the president and throwing the country into a convulsion of military repression and fear. Along with his wife and small son, Dorfman first sought refuge in Argentina (where he was born in 1942), then Amsterdam, Paris and finally the United States over the next 20 years—a bitter exile that defined and transformed him. A child of “perpetual wanderers”—his father, a communist, had been forced to leave Argentina with the family for Chile, then the U.S., before being hounded out during the McCarthy era—Dorfman was familiar with the miseries and loneliness of exile. He learned English early until his return to Chile at age 12, then immersed himself in the “language of insurrection,” Spanish. In exile, he used English to promote his lifelong pursuit to “vanquish silence” and expose the hideous human-rights abuses of the Pinochet dictatorship. Dorfman writes eloquently, even floridly, about his fiery early devotion to the peaceful socialist revolution of Allende, and that he and his starry-eyed generation were absolutely blindsided by the coup. In exile, his creative powers dried up (“What was happening to me, to us, was quite literally, unspeakable”), until he found courage in expression—his words would become “a territory where the dead could resuscitate.” Dorfman writes frankly of the morphing of his ideals, the seduction of America, the wariness with which he is regarded now by his Chilean compatriots and how he and his family decided not to stay in Chile when they finally returned in 1990.
A somber, moving tribute to a life of ideals and struggle.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-54946-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
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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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BOOK REVIEW
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