PEELING THE ONION

Name: PEELING THE ONION
Author: Günter Grass
ISBN: 978-0-15-101477-4

by Günter Grass & translated by Michael Henry Heim ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2007

The reader must decide whether this eloquent self-portrait does express regret, even atonement; represents yet another...

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The 1999 Nobel Prize–winner tells the story of his childhood, youth and early artistic career in a riveting memoir that has quickly attracted international controversy and not a little righteous anger.

For, the world now knows, the brilliant expressionist author—a painter and sculptor in words as in the visual and plastic arts he has likewise mastered—long known as a fierce critic of German xenophobia and in particular his country’s 20th-century history of aggression and genocide, kept silent for decades about his own experiences as a soldier of the Third Reich. In an essentially chronological narrative that frequently looks forward to Grass’s later years (he’s now in his 80s), we learn of his youth as the dreamy, artistically inclined son of a “bourgeois” shopkeeper’s family, as well as the apolitical “faith in the Führer” that inspired him to don a smart-looking uniform that might attract girls and to join Heinrich Himmler’s Waffen-S.S. (after attempting to enter the submarine service). We also receive information about his combat misadventures and borderline-arduous detainment in POW camps. Employing both first- and third-person narration, Grass pictures himself as an idealistic naïf who slowly developed a mature political conscience, as he emerged from the war unharmed, worked in a potash mine, then apprenticed to first a stone-cutter then a sculptor, traveled and absorbed culture (e.g., participating in a jam session joined by a visiting Louis Armstrong), married and fathered four children and earned fame with the publication of his first novel, The Tin Drum, in 1959. The command of incident and detail is superlative, and the book is immensely readable. But some will feel that Grass’s apologia, if it is such, amounts to too little too late. “I practiced the art of evasion,” he concedes, “[but] the massive weight of the German past and hence my own …. stood in my way …. No path led round it.”

The reader must decide whether this eloquent self-portrait does express regret, even atonement; represents yet another “evasion”; or, how much, in the final analysis, the difference actually matters.

Pub Date: June 25, 2007

ISBN: 978-0-15-101477-4

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
OF ALL THAT ENDS
by Günter Grass ; translated by Breon Mitchell ; illustrated by the author

- BOOK REVIEW
FROM GERMANY TO GERMANY
translated by Günter Grass ; by Krishna Winston

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BOX
by Günter Grass

GENGHIS KHAN AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD

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GENGHIS KHAN AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD

by Jack Weatherford ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 2, 2004

A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.

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“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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
EMPEROR OF THE SEAS
by Jack Weatherford

- BOOK REVIEW
GENGHIS KHAN AND THE QUEST FOR GOD
by Jack Weatherford

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE MONGOL QUEENS
by Jack Weatherford

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Awards & Accolades

National Book Award Winner

Pulitzer Prize Finalist

National Book Critics Circle Finalist

THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING

by Joan Didion ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 19, 2005

A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...

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Awards & Accolades

National Book Award Winner

Pulitzer Prize Finalist

National Book Critics Circle Finalist

A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.

In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.

A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.