Is there a father alive who would not weep at such an artful, tender tribute?
A Colombian writer delivers a rousing, affecting tribute to his father, Héctor Abad Gómez, a professor and physician who was murdered in 1987 by radical political opponents.
Gómez—who, according to the author, had limited skill with his hands and once inadvertently hastened the death of a surgical patient—moved from private practice to become a passionate advocate for public health, in Colombia and elsewhere, and a fiery writer of books, essays and op-ed pieces opposing violence and promoting personal freedom and equality—ideas sure to get you killed in many places. The son adored the father and writes about what in many ways was an ideal, if not idyllic, childhood. Gómez was extraordinarily affectionate and latitudinarian in just about everything. He continually encouraged his son, profoundly patient with him and loved him with a patent preference that in some ways, as the author recognizes, was unfair to the author’s sisters. Abad remembers the conflicts in his family, notably the deeply pious Roman Catholic women who struggled mightily against the father’s more liberal religious views. He also remembers with lingering horror the death of his own talented sister to cancer. The author creates enormous dramatic irony in his text: We know from the beginning that his father will be murdered, so Abad imbues every moment with an aching pathos. The translators have preserved his facile and sophisticated uses of the language. One 205-word sentence, for example, unspools with absolute clarity. Sometimes the detail is grim and wrenching—a sewer pipe clogged with tapeworms, his poor dying sister’s physical decline, his father’s bullet-riddled corpse. One small reservation: a tendency—somewhat understandable—to quote excessively from his father’s publications.
Is there a father alive who would not weep at such an artful, tender tribute?Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-374-22397-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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
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