Lively skirmishes with a deathly topic, giving the loss of life its due.
A finely crafted exploration of aging from gimlet-eyed essayist Shields (Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine, 2004, etc.).
“My dad will be dead soon; one day I’ll be dead; despite—or perhaps because of—all the data gathered in this book, I still find these two facts overwhelming,” he writes. His 97-year-old father, “cussedly, maddeningly alive and interesting” (and a very sharp writer himself), is an endless source of vexation, continuity and fascination for Shields, whose text is part autobiography, part biography of Dad and part compendium of the brute facts of existence. These brute facts have all the delicacy of gas explosions. Examining his own body as the wheels start falling off, Shields rattles off great swarms of ineluctable disorders, diminishments and declensions that attend the human passage from plum to prune. His observations are sensitive, often funny and occasionally rueful, a glimpse of such shadows as the loss of basketball skills that once spoke loudly about being alive: “I remember dusk and macadam combining into the sensation that the world was dying but I was indestructible.” Shields’s loss of hair and waning eyesight, the ineradicable back pain, the “ice pack stuck in one coat pocket and a baggie of ibuprofen in the other,” may seem quotidian, but he invests the roll-call of dwindlings with a hint of bravado, his prose as exquisitely paced as the patter of a soft-shoe dancer trying to cheat the final curtain.
Lively skirmishes with a deathly topic, giving the loss of life its due.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-26804-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
