Indelible characters, adventurous spirit, and acute psychological insight combine in this multilayered debut.
A memoir of arctic adventure that goes deeper into self-discovery and finding a home.
“I’ve spent more than half my life pointed northward, trying to answer private questions about violence and belonging and cold,” writes Braverman, a dog sledder and journalist whose frequent, extended visits to Norway and Alaska began from personal circumstances but soon assumed the significance of a quest to find a place where she belonged. Her journey from innocence to experience followed the map from south to north: “While southern Norwegians took pride in their restraint…northerners were loose and vulgar. They cursed, slurred their words, joked often about sex and death, and gauged time loosely.” As a teenage foreign exchange student in Norway who later led dog sled teams for tourists in Alaska, Braverman was frequently tested by the male-dominated culture, wondering when jokes crossed the line into something more, whether she was experiencing harassment or it was just in her head. Though the narrative jumps back and forth, chronologically and geographically, the voice throughout remains as insightful and engaging as it is uncertain, from a young woman who is never quite certain if she is safe, not only from the climate, but from so-called civilization, and where danger might lie. “The thing was, nothing that had happened to me…was beyond the normal scope of what happened to women all the time. Some harassment by an authority figure, a few sexual remarks, pressure from an insistent boyfriend?” Yet her experience allowed her to recognize what had been wrong all along, as she found pleasure in sex where she didn’t feel that pressure and fell in love of her own volition. Her external experiences are extraordinary in the frigid north that so few have experienced, but it’s what happens internally that both sets this memoir apart and gives it universal resonance.
Indelible characters, adventurous spirit, and acute psychological insight combine in this multilayered debut.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0062311566
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
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