An intriguing, albeit subjective, look at some of this century’s most interesting people. Lapierre (The City of Joy, 1985, etc.) has had the writing gig of the century. As a reporter for Paris Match, among other periodicals, he has traveled the world and chronicled some seminal historical moments. Here he recounts meetings with everyone from Mother Teresa to Mahatma Gandhi. Particularly riveting—and grippingly written—is a chapter on the last days of death-row inmate Caryl Chessman, who insisted on his innocence to his dying breath. Lapierre interviews Chessman six times and records firsthand each last-ditch effort to save the man, who eluded execution eight times in 12 years. The California judge’s call to stay the execution one last time reached the prison five seconds after the cyanide pills had been dropped into the sulfuric acid. Interspersed with the “interviews” is Lapierre’s own story, which raises this quibble: The book seems a tad self-serving at times. Was the famous bullfighter El Cordobes really a vital 20th-century figure—one of the “thousand suns” referred to in the Indian proverb from which the book derives its title—or is he a convenient, albeit fascinating, means to remind the reader that Lapierre and Larry Collins wrote a book (Or I’ll Dress You in Mourning) based on their Reader’s Digest profile of the Spaniard? Still, the book is lively and Lapierre a terrific tour guide. Besides, it’s hard to dislike an author who has used millions of dollars in book royalties to help bring medical care to desperately indigent people in Calcutta, a point Lapierre carefully annotates in an appendix that outlines the work he has accomplished there and in the Ganges Delta before giving addresses for readers who want to make donations. Memoir or selective chronicle of a century? Regardless, you’ll keep reading. (30 b&w photos)
Pub Date: March 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-446-52535-9
Page Count: 496
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
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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