An engaging, handsomely full-dress, but oddly unrevealing biography of the unquestioned master of locked-room mysteries and impossible crimes. Carr (190677) was the most fascinating of the great detective writers, including Dorothy Sayers and Rex Stout, who flourished between the wars. Greene (History/Old Dominion Univ.), who has already edited four volumes of Carr's short stories and radio plays, accurately identifies the apparently incompatible elements the writer exploited in such genre classics as The Three Coffins and The Burning Court: ``supernatural atmosphere, fair- play detection, complex but lively narratives, uproarious comedy, and a romantic interest in the past and in Adventure in the Grand Manner.'' Greene shines as a bibliographer; anyone who has tried to bring order to Carr's prodigious output will be grateful to him. But although he can trenchantly summarize individual habits of mind (on his subject's conservatism, for instance: ``Carr almost never objected to a social structure''), Greene never succeeds in resolving, or even in satisfyingly exploring, the contradictions of Carr's personality, by turns punctilious and devil-may-care, or the simultaneously florid and analytically precise nature of his stories. And Greene's copious criticism of the novels and tales accepts Carr's own standards of judgment- -which emphasize above all liveliness and the conscientious placement of clues—so completely that, though his judgments of relative merit are apt, they are never more acute than the author's own. The major biographical revelations here—Carr's periodic drinking and wenching, the influence of his accomplished radio plays (``probably the best mystery dramas ever created for the radio'') on his inferior later novels, the stroke he tried to keep from his public in 1963—will come as no surprise to knowledgeable fans. Carr's legion of readers will know better than to expect any major new critical or biographical insights from this entertaining five-course feast of the familiar.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-883402-47-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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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