Many knowledgeable comments about art, music and publishing intertwined with religious commentary of the sort one expects...
A journal kept by the scion of the famed publishing family records memories of his coming of age, his youthful conversion to Roman Catholicism and his evolving thoughts on family, art, music, literature and God.
Every spiritual journey that the profoundly religious Scribner documented in 2002 is familiar, conventional even, with few surprises and no epiphanies—though he sees the latter everywhere, just as he sees the hand of God in every coincidence and the touch of an angel in every kindness. Scribner remarks that he believes religion can lead a person to art just as art can lead a person to religion, and both art and music are prominent in many of his entries. Others are autobiographical shards that eventually combine to form a memoir of privilege that ends shortly after he earns his Ph.D. from Princeton and goes to work as an editor at the family’s eponymous publishing house. The author appears to believe in the literal truth of the Gospels, though he is troubled by certain violent aspects of the Old Testament. Twice he expresses great discomfort with Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac; he prefers to view it as Abraham’s misunderstanding of God’s intent. Likewise, he informs us that he doesn’t permit Scribner authors to refer to Hemingway’s death as a suicide, for that is a mortal sin, and surely pious Papa is not roasting in Hell. One of Scribner’s epiphanies is decidedly odd: “Rocks don’t change: they are the constant touchstone of time.” (Geology, we must conclude, has it wrong.) On Christmas night he has another epiphany: Less is more. The next day, he’s on a plane to Florida. We can only hope that, true to the revelation, he’s downgraded his accommodations to coach.
Many knowledgeable comments about art, music and publishing intertwined with religious commentary of the sort one expects from the spiritual-journey genre.Pub Date: April 18, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-51658-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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