A soulful account of Western vistas and New Age mantras.
American travel writer Nealson (New Mexico’s Sanctuaries, Retreats, and Sacred Places, 2014, etc.) shares her tales of life on the road in North America and Mexico.
The author and her husband decided to chuck it all and “trade real estate for wheel estate.” So they sold their home, bought a recreational vehicle that they dubbed “Tortuga,” and set out for parts (mostly) unknown. Traveling up and down the West Coast, from British Columbia to Mexico, they visited various friends along the way and made occasional side trips to famous places, such as the Grand Canyon. They also made new friends, buried a pet, had RV trouble, took hikes, and learned that life on the road is not without occasional bumps. The author was soon reminded of some early advice that she received in a chat room when she was first considering the RV life: “You’d better darned well like the person you’re with because you’re going to sit across a small table and look at him every day.” Nealson is a colorful writer, particularly when describing some bit of nature that’s caught her eye or ear, as when she tells of one peaceful morning having “Meadowlark surround-sound.” She can also be quite funny: at one campground in the Southwest, she notes that watching the other RV-ers is like watching her own “personal episode from The Beverly Hillbillies.” She quotes witticisms from George Carlin and Oscar Wilde, as well. However, she’s also prone to using New Age-y jargon, including many references to the “Creatrix,” which may not appeal to every reader. Still, there’s a lot of wisdom here: “Why,” she wonders, “was it some pushed back and others pushed over, content with the status quo?” And she’s certainly no pushover herself: whether she’s facing a mother bear and her cubs or the painful reality that her marriage may be in trouble, she always jumps in with an adventurous spirit and an open heart.
A soulful account of Western vistas and New Age mantras.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4782-9135-0
Page Count: 226
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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