A pretentious trifle from a writer whose fiction, whatever its artistic deficiencies, can at least usually be described as substantial. Michener was invited to visit Poland in 1988, ostensibly by the Writers' Union but actually by the government. Years earlier, he had recounted the buffer state's bloody, checkered history in a best-selling novel (Poland, 1983) that, while well received by the populace, had made him persona non grata with the Communist regime. Apparently eager for a reconciliation, Party officials awarded the octogenarian author an unspecified medal and gave him and his entourage the run of the country. Michener provides a cursory, consistently upbeat account of his VIP excursions in Poland during a period when winds of change were beginning to whistle through Eastern Europe, and in a subsequent trip to Rome, where he renewed acquaintances with Pope John Paul II as well as with the US ambassadors to the Vatican and Italy. The author also offers high-sounding asides on the coincidental nature of human life, socioeconomic events, and other weighty matters. Lest anyone miss the point, he appends a postscript entitled "The Deeper Meeting." While Michener clearly aspired to record a journey of the spirit, he has produced a mundane travelogue remarkable more for piety than wit. The brief (128-page), happy-talk text has 39 photographs of notables and lesser lights, which include shots of baseball great Start Musial playing the clown in the Colosseum and elsewhere.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1990
ISBN: 0878579109
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Rodale
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1990
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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