A moving tribute, unsparingly honest. The harrowing close is almost unreadable.
Intimate, excruciating memoir of the life and death of his wife, poet Jane Kenyon, by prolific author Hall.
Hall (Willow Temple, 2003, etc.) segments his story into periods of the couple’s 23-year marriage, starting from Kenyon’s terrible early death from leukemia in April 1995 and reaching back to their first in meeting, in 1969, at the University of Michigan, where Hall taught literature and Kenyon, more than 20 years younger, was a student and fledgling poet. Most of their married life was spent rustically at the Hall’s family farm in Wilmot, N.H., where the two cultivated gardens, wrote poetry, worked freelance and experienced a kind of reclusive solidarity next to each other. Curiously, their harmonious life of poetry was documented only the year before Kenyon’s death by Bill Moyers in the PBS broadcast A Life Together. But Kenyon’s diagnosis with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) changed everything, and she underwent immediate and devastating chemotherapy, a steady infusion of poisons and drugs through her Hickman incision, intractable pain and enervating side effects, such as dementia and depression, that compounded her existing depression. The prognosis is poor for a woman of 46 (ALL usually strikes children), and Kenyon endured an agonizing bone marrow transplant in Seattle from an anonymous donor (whom Hall later met). For 15 months, the inseparable couple battled the disease raging in Kenyon’s blood: Hall depicts their kinship poignantly, sparing few details of human fragility and debilitation. The days of Kenyon’s virtual imprisonment inside a sterile cell (her LAF room, for “laminar air flow”), while she was pumped with a steady flow of poisonous Cytoxan, reads like a scene in a death chamber. “Rarely, during LAF, could I do something useful for Jane,” Hall laments. In alternating chapters, he portrays the creative, peaceful life the two carved out for themselves, both of them dedicated to their craft.
A moving tribute, unsparingly honest. The harrowing close is almost unreadable.Pub Date: May 10, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-47801-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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