“The hitchhiker’s most constant, implacable enemy,” writes Wald, “is simple boredom.” Readers of his book may share the...
Tedious chronicle of a cross-country hitchhiking trip.
Now in his 40s, music-writer Wald (Escaping the Delta, 2004, etc.) has been hitchhiking since he was a teen. The freedom and surprise of thumbing thrill him. He loves the instant intimacy he finds with drivers. He delights in finally arriving at a truck stop and getting a shower. On the particular trip chronicled here, he meets many interesting people, among them a Russian trucker, a Mexican man who sells used cars over the border and an affable missionary who attempts to proselytize him. Wald spells out the etiquette: If the driver wants to talk, listen; speak when spoken to; try to stay awake. Interspersed throughout is a history of hitchhiking. Though the word is relatively recent, the idea is ancient; even Odysseus did it. The 1960s and ’70s were a unique era when folks hitched for pleasure, but during the ’80s, fewer and fewer people took to the road, and hitchhiking gained a reputation as dangerous rather than carefree. Men tend to hitch more than women, but Wald notes the curious fact that current pop stars who like to thumb a ride are mostly women, including Ani DiFranco, Michelle Shocked and Courtney Love. A vignette about a cop who sternly reminded him that hitchhiking is illegal is mildly engaging, a visit to Hannibal, Mo., prompts reflections on Mark Twain that are mildly insightful—but pretty much everything else Wald relates is tepid at best and his attempts at profundity and depth lame: “Hitchhiking is an exercise of faith,” “Faith is a beautiful thing,” “In every journey there are moments of doubt,” “With freedom comes responsibility.” The concluding poem is just embarrassing.
“The hitchhiker’s most constant, implacable enemy,” writes Wald, “is simple boredom.” Readers of his book may share the feeling.Pub Date: May 31, 2006
ISBN: 1-55652-605-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
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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