A useful handbook of a sort, as well as a concluding chapter to his mother’s life.
Death be not proud: an affecting and discomfiting account, by her son, of Susan Sontag’s last days.
As a writer and intellectual, Sontag lived much of her life in public, and often glamorously, courting controversies and participating in literary brawls, jetting back and forth between Paris and New York, filling pages. In private, like her idol, Bulgarian-born novelist Elias Canetti, she feared death inordinately, writing in an early journal of “not being able to even imagine that one day I will no longer be alive.” Having survived one bout with breast cancer, she was amazed, a quarter-century later, to find herself stricken by myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), which her doctor, “as if he had a family of village idiots sitting in front of him, [called] a particularly lethal form of blood cancer.” That announcement, writes her son Rieff (At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention, 2005, etc.), seems to have stopped Sontag cold, at least for a moment: The woman who had taught herself about the inner workings of volcanoes, epidemics, film, photography and more topics now seemed incurious, particularly about her illness. Rieff wonders, rightly, whether more pointed inquiry would have brought Sontag solace. He concludes that despair would have been the likely outcome, and that his mother’s expectation of him was “an adamant refusal to accept that it was even possible that she might not survive.” She did not, of course, and, as Rieff relates in detail not for the squeamish, hers was not an easy death, for all that she had written wisely and bravely about death in the abstract. Rieff, who admits that he fears dying, writes thoughtfully about a child’s duties in the time of dying.
A useful handbook of a sort, as well as a concluding chapter to his mother’s life.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9946-6
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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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