A profound, searching remembrance that explores a complex family bond.
Debut author Burns recalls growing up in the shadow of her glamorous mother in this memoir.
The book opens with a description of a recurring nightmare, which the author experienced sporadically over many years following her mother’s death. In it, she fails to call her ill mother, as she’s unable to remember her telephone number. Wracked with guilt, she asks herself, “How could I be such a terrible daughter?” Throughout her relationship with her mom, Burns says, she was always in “chasing mode, in longing pursuit of something fleeting.” Dotty, the author’s parent, was a “spectacular woman everyone thought was a movie star”; she was frequently compared to Rita Hayworth. The memoir reveals that Dotty married into the Canzoneri family, who owned an exclusive country club that was frequented by members of the New York criminal underworld. Dotty dazzled the clientele, and her lifelong passion for socializing resulted in her daughter often being sidelined. The memoir’s title is a reference to the fact that on Saturdays, the author and her mother would spend time together, shopping and having ice cream. Burns addresses how she coped with always playing “second fiddle” to her mom while also feeling “desperate to be loved by her.” She’s a devilishly sharp writer who achieves a masterful balance of psychological excavation and sumptuous description. Here’s her acerbic accounting of her maternal grandfather: “he was a man with no family at all—as if he too had sprouted fully formed, miserable and alone after he ate whoever made him.” However, when it comes to her mother, she rarely moves beyond her image of her as a “goddess.” When describing Dotty’s lifestyle, Burns vividly evokes the glamour of mid-20th-century American high society; for instance, she recalls how her mom “dressed in full regalia for all her public travels…with fitted knee-length pencil skirts and high patent leather heels.” But the most affecting aspect of this memoir is how the author is liberated by confronting her idealized perception of her parent while remaining tender to her memory. (Illustrated with black-and-white family photographs.)
A profound, searching remembrance that explores a complex family bond.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-547-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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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