The memoirs of an Armenian-American as she struggles for self- awareness. Avakian, whose mother and grandmother came to the US after surviving the Turkish genocide against the Armenians, grew up in New York and New Jersey in the 40's and 50's, lived as a professor's wife in the 60's, and entered the feminist movement—- recognizing her own identity as a lesbian—-in the 70's. Avakian's story begins with her struggle to ``become an American.'' All but denying her Armenian heritage, she attends a ``regular'' church, makes Jewish and Greek friends, and avoids her family's demands whenever possible. She studies art history at Alfred Univ. and then Columbia, marries a young academic and travels with him from one teaching appointment to another while raising their two young children. Avakian is at her best when describing her married years: The confusion and oppression she felt then are palpable. After becoming pregnant with her first child, she says, ``I spent most of the time sitting in the apartment and staring at the walls....I just sat and waited for the baby that had already changed my life.'' Her observations of university life and her accounts of friendships are also vivid and engrossing. But her chronicle bogs down with too-long descriptions of courses and university bickering. Avakian also does little to explore her Armenian heritage, and when she does return to the subject in the last chapter—by interviewing her relatives—the effort seems merely tacked on. Despite the Armenian-American twist, this is primarily the story of an academic wife breaking out of the mold to re-create herself. As such, it's well written and acutely observant, though slow in parts.
Pub Date: April 1, 1992
ISBN: 1-55861-051-0
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992
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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