A loving remembrance told with humor and cheer.
One woman’s sentimental memoir about her colorful mother.
Debut author Radford writes that she found herself often quoting her voluble mom, Margery, so she began to catalog all the “Margeryisms” she could recall as a kind of linguistic homage. Those scattershot remembrances form the basis of this memoir—a portrait in short essays. Radford’s parents moved to Troon, a small town on the western coast of Scotland, sometime in the mid-1950s; the family moved often within that town—eight times—and many of the author’s recollections take place there. Her mother was truly eccentric; she would cook beef heart for the dog, for example, or free a pet hamster so that he could be properly “fulfilled.” She was also a natural raconteur with a gift for turning beautifully polished, if peculiar, phrases. Once, when asked if she had enough to eat, she replied, “I have had an elegant sufficiency. Any more would be sheer gluttony on my part.” Some of her coinages were more obscure: when she expressed exuberant joy, for instance, she might exclaim, “bonnets over the windmill,” although it was never precisely clear why. And once, when asked why a previous engagement didn’t work out, she cryptically replied, “All cats are grey in the dark.” Of course, there’s much more to the author’s mother than her amusing theatricality, and what emerges here is a full picture of a playful, loving woman with a gimlet eye. The book has an impressionistic structure; some essays are very brief, like a snapshot, but collectively, they treat readers to the full arc of the author’s life with her parents, from her early years to her adulthood in the United States, where she pursued her medical studies. Like her mother, Radford herself has a flair for memorable description, and her prose is clear, quick-witted, and often tenderly nostalgic—no surprise from an author who still keeps a locket of hair from her childhood dog. Overall, this is a beautiful chronicle, touching, amusing, and unabashedly grateful.
A loving remembrance told with humor and cheer.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5246-5258-6
Page Count: 184
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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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