Next book

TURN LEFT AT THE TROJAN HORSE

A WOULD-BE HERO’S AMERICAN ODYSSEY

A quest for authenticity and self-acceptance, marred by occasional sentimentality and banality, but ultimately redeemed by a...

Herzog’s third travel memoir (Small World: A Microcosmic Journey, 2004, etc.) follows the highways cross-country to his college reunion at Cornell University, examining the idea of the hero along the way.

The author begins close to Mt. Olympus, Wash.; like his role model, Odysseus, he headed for Ithaca (New York in this case). Herzog took off in a mammoth Winnebago, visiting hamlets called Troy, Calypso, Siren and Plato, as well as some places he once called home. Camping in RV parks and Wal-Mart parking lots and eating in homegrown cafés, the author talked with a wide variety of people, including farmers, cops, small-town politicians and more. There is “Hobo Dan,” who supports his lifestyle by making earrings out of gopher paws; Bud, a sassy 95-year-old who brags that his driver’s license is valid until he’s 102; and Ray, a volunteer cosmologist who has recorded the weather in Pandora, Ohio, every night since 1949. Herzog is at his best when he allows these amusing, winsome folks to tell their stories in their own voices. He also captures stunning details of the American landscape—black Angus cattle grazing peacefully on a pale green mountainside; a Yield sign riddled with bullet holes presiding over a crossroads in the middle of nowhere; steam rising from the ground in a former coal-mining town in Pennsylvania; a monument honoring a faithful dog named Shep. The exhaustive self-analysis, on the other hand, becomes tiresome, though there are flashes of excellent self-awareness, like Herzog’s characterization of himself as “sushi-eating, Gap-wearing, left-leaning interloper” at a tractor-pull competition. Attempts to draw parallels between his experiences and classical mythology result in some jarring transitions and tedious digressions, but the denouement, the hero’s return, is irresistible.

A quest for authenticity and self-acceptance, marred by occasional sentimentality and banality, but ultimately redeemed by a near-perfect ending.

Pub Date: June 1, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-8065-3202-8

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Citadel/Kensington

Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Next book

GENGHIS KHAN AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD

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

Close Quickview