Whether rabble-rousing at Baptist summer camp or guarding seal pups by the Salish Sea, Peterson has a gift for describing...
An environmentalist writer’s lifelong struggle with her evangelical roots.
Given her career of writing passionately about nature and her ecological activism, one might think that Peterson (Animal Heart, 2004, etc.) was reared in a family of liberal environmentalists. In fact, her household was just the opposite: fundamentalist, Southern Baptist, and evangelical to the core. She began to doubt her place in God’s Christian army from a young age, when her pensive questions about animals’ souls and the afterlife got her kicked out of Sunday School and regularly rebuked at the family dinner table. She could never come to terms with the way that Christian fundamentalists, who considered themselves “in this world but not of it,” could fixate on a future in heaven while disregarding the beauty and fragility here on earth. This dangerous backwardness was most appalling in her father, who eventually headed of the U.S. Forestry Service. It wasn’t until well after college, newly recovered from a harrowing stint as an editorial staffer at the New Yorker, that Peterson learned to hold her own with her boisterous, highly conservative relatives. After years spent on the West Coast among liberals supposedly more like herself, Peterson began to recognize parallels between the rigid fundamentalism of End Times evangelists and the doomsday environmentalist camp. Both dwelled on the negative and used fear of annihilation as their main conversion tactic, and neither could satisfy her longing for a spiritual home in the natural world. By keeping the thread of her theme running consistently throughout the book, the author offers a selective memoir that blends her unique autobiography with compassionate and levelheaded observations about family, food, religion, life and our relationships with living things.
Whether rabble-rousing at Baptist summer camp or guarding seal pups by the Salish Sea, Peterson has a gift for describing her life’s many adventures with disarming understatement and narrative poise.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-306-81804-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Merloyd Lawrence/Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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.
