Vibrantly, blissfully sublime.
A creatively executed memoir rekindling the epoch of an eccentric native New Yorker.
The “lasting city” in openly gay novelist McCourt’s (Now Voyagers, 2007, etc.) creative chronicle is, of course, Manhattan. The author supplies autobiographical details through vacillating memories, both fond and painful, and weaves them together in an artful tapestry of fever-dreamed conversations, nostalgic poignancy and rich Gotham history. His mother’s death in 2003 seems to be the catalyst here. Awash in grief, McCourt, now in his early 70s, writes of leaving her deathbed to desperately scurry into the city to share his heartache with strangers like an aging Broadway showgirl/diner waitress and an Indian cabbie, who both seemed to restore his faith in humanity. Further recollections detail McCourt’s troublesome Irish-Catholic family and upbringing, which commingle beautifully with memories of his precocious adolescence as a burgeoning homosexual in the 1950s. Undeterred by the era’s often violent consequences for indulging in same-sex carnalities, the author reveled in clandestine trysts on Fire Island or wandered Central Park’s Ramble, “by night the haunt of the sexually intrepid male homosexual horndog on the scent.” McCourt’s drifting, serpentine narrative unfurls a lush and prideful profile, painstakingly contemplated and clearly written from the heart. The writer tells the stories of his gay youth, his family’s melodrama and his own sweet maturation with an intoxicating amalgam of poetry, quotation, fantasy, and the kind of sweeping, colorful language that creates a kaleidoscope of precious memories. In the opening chapter, his outspoken mother, mere weeks before succumbing to the stroke that would cause her death, urges her son to “tell everything.” From that instruction springs forth McCourt’s shimmering opus of a unique, regretless and effervescent lifetime in the existential city of dreams.
Vibrantly, blissfully sublime.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-87140-458-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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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