Part two of Gillies’ (Happens Every Day, 2009) chatty, bittersweet chronicle of loss and renewal.
“I had to get my shit together,” writes the disillusioned author, who, in this memoir sequel, plods onward and incrementally upward after separating from her husband in Ohio, taking her two sons and moving in with her parents in New York City. Separation agreement official and wedding band removed (the area replaced with an angry rash), Gillies ruefully struggled with modern city life after picking up the pieces of a shattered life once her husband Josiah left her to marry another woman. Her situation alternately cheerless and “exciting” (the dating scene!), Gillies interviewed schools and babysitters, revived a recurring role on Law & Order and uncomfortably shared split vacations and custody with Josiah for the sake of the boys. Romantically determined to rediscover that coveted “deep purple, electrifying, all-consuming and painful love,” she blind dated via e-mail and tested an old friend’s capacity for love. With the same self-effacing prose found in her debut, Gillies describes her journey from the pain of lost love to the land of the living with humor and compassion. Too often, however, the self-described “drama queen” waxes melodramatically, like she was the first and only survivor of a heart-wrenching divorce. Readers who enjoyed the author’s earlier memoir—and books like it—will find her saga engrossing and heartfelt, though the writing remains scruffy and rambling. Gillies still wants love at first sight (again), but one year later, will it still only take six seconds to happen? Readers will cheer along with the author, whose heart overflows in the conclusion of this enduring story of life after love. The writing is uneven, and the author strains for material in the final chapters, but there’s plenty of love, humor and hope to spare.
Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4013-4162-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Voice/Hyperion
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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