The prose reads like journal entries or letters to readers, punctuated by sometimes-trite remarks: “Death is the ultimate...
NPR host Rehm (Life with Maxie, 2010, etc.) reflects on loneliness, loss, and aging.
“For fifty-four years I have been a wife,” Rehm writes in a memoir more notable for candor than artfulness. “Now I am widow. Am I someone new?” In the mid-2000s, her husband, John, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, marking a profound change in their lives. As he gradually succumbed to the illness, the author found herself increasingly alone: the couple slept in separate bedrooms because of John’s involuntary thrashing, and in 2012, he moved into an assisted living facility because he needed 24-hour care. Despondent over his condition, he begged for help to end his life. “We had promised that we would do everything we could to support each other’s wishes in the face of debilitating and unalterable conditions,” Rehm writes. But she was helpless, as were John’s physicians. Making his own decision, John refused food, water, or medicines, and after 10 days, “surely the longest of my life,” the author admits, he died. Rehm was beset by guilt, worrying that she should have given up her career to care for John during the final year of his life. As she looks back at their sometimes-rocky marriage, she blames herself for not being passive or submissive enough to please a man who wanted to dominate. The author is often overcome by grief, not only for John, but “for our youth, for our love, for our happiness.” Widowhood is not the only identity change that Rehm has faced. She wonders who she will be once she retires and how, beginning her eighth decade, she can continue as “a fully engaged human being.”
The prose reads like journal entries or letters to readers, punctuated by sometimes-trite remarks: “Death is the ultimate finality,” she writes. “There is no turning back.” Nevertheless, her perspectives on old age are brave and uplifting.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-87528-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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
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