A surprisingly hopeful meditation on why we shed tears.
An eclectic reflection on human waterworks.
Award-winning poet Christle (Creative Writing/Emory Univ. Heliopause, 2015, etc.) pushes the boundaries of her genre with this hybrid approach to tears. Fusing poetry with lyric essay and a significant amount of research, the author sheds new light on the basic, universal phenomenon of crying. Beyond fact—namely, that at one point or another, fluid has leaked from everyone’s eyes—some may wonder what more there is to know. This book provides the definitive answer: plenty. There are no chapters. Rather, in one long reflection, divided into small, partial-page sections, Christle examines such elements as pretend grief (she cites poet Chelsey Minnis, who calls it “cry-hustling”); “white tears,” (a Caucasian person’s response to suddenly realizing the enormity of systemic racism); and the differences between the three types of tears: basal (lubricant), irritant (a response to a foreign substance), and psychogenic (emotional). She also considers the distinction between crying and weeping—“crying is louder; weeping is wetter”—and introduces readers to professional mourners and lachrymatories, small vessels in which tears are stored. Of particular interest is Christle’s inquiry into the connections among grief, gender, and anger. She wonders “whether men kill to create an occasion for the grief they already feel.” The author infuses these tear-related themes with prose about her personal experiences, including her own treatment for depression and her staggering grief over a dear friend’s suicide. The format of the book lends itself to either quick consumption or measured contemplation; sections range from one sentence to a little more than a page. Though this structure could make for a choppy text, the transitions between her various sources and streams of thought are mostly seamless, providing a pleasurable, even restful reading experience. The narrative is saturated with significant threads of sadness, but they don’t overwhelm. Rather, the unconventional format, combined with the author’s vast survey of the topic, provides fascinating food for thought.
A surprisingly hopeful meditation on why we shed tears.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948226-44-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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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