Looking for a riveting reunited twin tale? Stick with The Parent Trap.
Intriguing but clunky account of twins who found each other in midlife.
In 1969, two families in New York each adopted a baby girl who had been given up by a mentally ill birth mother. Neither the adoptive parents nor the girls themselves knew about the existence of a twin. More than three decades later, the younger sister, Schein, petitioned the adoption agency for information about her birth mother and learned about her twin. She quickly tracked down Bernstein, a married mom who led a calm, settled life and sometimes felt that her aimless, single sister wanted too much from her. Their attempt to forge an adult relationship was initially fraught, but eventually the two women settled into a comfortable friendship and determined to find out who their mother was and why they were separated. The most interesting sections of their joint memoir chronicle their detective work. It turned out that Schein and Bernstein were unwitting subjects in a very controversial study of twins reared in different homes. Trying to understand the study’s ethics and aims, the sisters traveled to numerous archives, tracked down the nonagenarian doctor who spearheaded the project and talked to other separated twins. Their book probes the nature-nurture debate and considers whether the findings of a study that lacked participants’ informed consent ought to be made public. Unfortunately, stilted prose sucks the life out of this promising material. Lacking individual character, Schein’s and Bernstein’s alternating first-person sections have the same trite, melodramatic voice, given to statements like, “I mourn for the abandoned orphan I once was.” The dialogue is especially unconvincing: “I realize now that yours is the heartbeat I’ve always missed,” Schein tells her sister.
Looking for a riveting reunited twin tale? Stick with The Parent Trap.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6496-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
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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