The off-the-path travel author (Lost Worlds, 1993, etc.) spends a ripe year in the boot of Italy.
Yeadon takes readers into the heart and ways of Aliano, an old hilltop village in the region known as Basilicata, way down south. Not quite as “remarkably unexplored” as Yeadon would have it—the settlement can trace its roots back to the sixth-century b.c.—it’s still a wild place, not without its pagan aspects, full of the unexpected, the troubling, the wonderful. What was that howl he heard when the moon was full, that rustling in the deserted rooms of a rain-racked ghost town, and who was that ancient woman who got his broken-down car to start one night by a laying of hands on the motor? For insights into the mysteries of the place, Yeadon turns frequently to the writings of Carlo Levi, the anti-fascist author of Christ Stopped at Eboli, who was sent into internal exile in Aliano by Mussolini. But he also consults a fine company of locals, from the maker of excellent bricks to the seller of excellent sardines and the men and women with a hand for cooking. They tell him stories, they explain a widow’s obligations, they usher him, haltingly, into the archaic and animistic. Yeadon will visit, and describe in leisurely detail, cave dwellings, a cathedral from the 13th century, and a handful of improbable hilltop villages; he will eat wild-boar stew, and he will find a town “still mysterious and elusively tied to a darker age and deeper pagani touchstones of knowledge and belief.” Remarkably, for Yeadon is practically defined by his restlessness, Aliano makes him sit awhile and feed his many interior selves.
More fine work from a stylish and cultured writer with a hungry, open curiosity, a knack for compressing without diminishing, and an unfettered love for life and serendipity. (46 line drawings)Pub Date: July 16, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-053110-X
Page Count: 480
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | WORLD | HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | MODERN | U.S. GOVERNMENT | POLITICS | HISTORY
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