A searing memoir and sharp social critique marred only slightly by the author’s excessive self-flagellation.
A professor turns to her family to offer a powerful memoir revolving around her younger cousin, who was murdered at the age of 29.
Allen (Director, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics/Harvard Univ.; Education and Equality, 2016, etc.) adored her cousin, Michael Alexander Allen, who possessed a winning personality and wide smile. Although he had the potential to succeed in school, Michael turned to petty crime at a young age and was convicted of a felony at 15. The author blames herself for failing to halt Michael’s wildness, and she condemns the criminal justice system for punishing Michael as an adult instead of a juvenile. Her critique of juvenile detention centers and adult prisons is convincing. Racial discrimination alone did not yield all of the injustices aimed at Michael, but they certainly contributed. When he won his freedom after 11 years in prison, he declared that he would become successful; the author believed him and offered him extraordinary help with a job search, rental housing, and college applications. However, she had no clue that Michael was leading a triple life: the “good” Michael was also deeply involved in crime and in a stormy relationship with a lover prone to violence. Allen details the circumstances of the murder and then offers flashbacks as she pieces together the circumstances of Michael’s life, foreshadowing its violent end. Much of the evidence offered through the flashbacks derives from Allen’s personal involvement in her extended family’s history. Some of the knowledge, however, comes from Allen’s decision to act as an investigative journalist, sharing what she learned from her aggressive reporting, no matter how unpleasant her findings. As the author chronicles her discoveries about how much Michael successfully hid from her, she is sometimes unduly hard on herself.
A searing memoir and sharp social critique marred only slightly by the author’s excessive self-flagellation.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63149-311-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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