An odd mix of revealing personal memoir and academic writing that its author calls experimental ethnography. Ellis (Sociology/Univ. of South Florida) tells the story of her complex and constantly shifting relationship with Gene Weinstein from their first meeting in 1975, when she was a 24- year-old graduate student and he a 44-year-old professor of sociology, until his death from emphysema in 1984. As Ellis's mentor at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, Weinstein was something of a control freak, and if anyone dominated their early relationship it was he. Over the nine years they were together, the relationship took various twists and turns as his emphysema grew steadily worse and his dependence on Ellis increased. She eventually became his caretaker and, when he was on his deathbed, his wife. Ellis does not spare either herself or Weinstein. These are two articulate, intelligent adults who are sometimes angry, selfish, and petty; sometimes thoughtful, patient, and loving; and sometimes an untidy mixture of all of the above. They comfort each other, they scream at each other, they embarrass each other, they protect themselves. And Ellis reports it all as both participant and observer. Her detailed account of the changing dynamics of their relationship is presented in Parts 2, 3, and 4; thus readers primarily interested in the love story can read it without interruption if they choose. Ellis hopes that social scientists will see her work as a legitimate humanizing and personalizing of sociology, and in parts 1, 5, and 6, she gives the book a sociological framework by explaining her methodology and her intent. Sociologists will undoubtedly quibble about its acceptability as a piece of scientific writing. Let them. This is a remarkably revealing portrait of a couple dealing with a debilitating chronic illness. Gutsy and very good.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56639-270-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Temple Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
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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