A fine introduction to the work of a writer who ought to have won a Nobel Prize, and who richly deserves future generations...
An informative critical biography, commissioned by the publisher, of the great Czech writer (1890–1938), whose witty allegorical and satirical fiction and drama comprise a treasure trove largely unexplored by contemporary readers.
Klíma, himself an estimable fiction writer (No Saints or Angels, 2001, etc.), expertly layers in revealing details about the introverted Capek’s unstable health and frustrating romantic life (until his eventual marriage), friendship with Czech President Tomas G. Masaryk, and “efforts to educate the nation” as a consummate journalist and public intellectual. Klíma locates the sources of Capek’s rejection of absolutism in all forms (including that of Nazism, whose worst excesses he essentially prophesied) in his admiration for the American pragmatist philosophers—while also emphasizing Capek’s distrust of both America’s “worship of technology” and the oversimplifications of communism. Klíma also offers precise readings of Capek’s famous futurist plays R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots (it was Capek who invented the word “robot”) and From the Life of the Insects (the inspiration for Russian writer Victor Pelevin’s 1998 novel, The Life of Insects); the Swiftian novel War with the Newts (1937); and the brilliant, partially autobiographical trilogy, including Hordubal (1946), Meteor (1935), and An Ordinary Life (1936). He furthermore whets readers’ appetites for new English versions of Capek’s 1925 novel, Krakatit, a probing analysis of the Faustian experience of creating, then harnessing a powerful explosive, which is his most Dostoevskyan and Lawrencian work, and the eerie philosophical play The Makropoulos Secret (also 1925), praised as one of Capek’s most successful fusions of idea and melodrama. Readers who have enjoyed recent translations of Capek’s provocatively entertaining Apocryphal Tales and Tales from Two Pockets will finish this eager to sample these and other works of Capek’s impressive (and, unfortunately, foreshortened) maturity.
A fine introduction to the work of a writer who ought to have won a Nobel Prize, and who richly deserves future generations of readers.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-945774-53-2
Page Count: 266
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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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