Wrenchingly painful, but intensely affecting.
Novelist Burgess (Exposures, 2005, etc.) expressively and excruciatingly chronicles her emotional struggle when cancer afflicts her husband.
It may seem odd that nearly every scene is infused with aromas, plant life, outdoor atmospherics, colors, food and wine, but this approach is appropriate: From the moment Burgess met and fell in love with Ken Grunzweig in 1988, it was apparent that their shared appreciation of the sensuous pleasures of being human was a central element in their bond. She was 31, really in love for the first time; he was 44 and had endured the gruesome deaths of two wives. Despite these traumas, Ken remained an unusually self-aware, evolved, giving man. The couple continued in thrall to each other as they raised two kids, first in the San Francisco Bay area and then in Spokane, Wash. Fourteen years into their joyful marriage, cancer struck Ken. Narrating the subsequent barrage of medical treatments and uncertainty, Burgess lyrically and perceptively explores how the body, emotions and experiences are connected, how love and misfortune affect that landscape. The author’s strained relationship with her mother, and Ken’s with his adult daughter, further illuminate these inquiries. Describing chemotherapy medicines as “priceless bags of chemical hope” may seem excessive, but Burgess’s romantic prose only rarely seems overwritten. In the context of her attempts to unearth understanding from such a devastating event, the gush of feeling tugs the reader along on a difficult ride during which insight is the only comfort and stabbing inevitability underlies every embrace and home-cooked meal. Burgess self-identifies as a proponent of science over religion, but there is a generous helping of “Spiritual Lite” (the title of one chapter), including a vision of the dead. These forays into the mystical do not go unexamined; the author examines how the idea of “God” helps her and Ken to confront his illness.
Wrenchingly painful, but intensely affecting.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7679-2859-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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