Though it ends with a grace note as her mother and father sow their land with longleaf, in essence it’s an elegy for a...
Evocative observations about her return to the southern family farm in an attempt to gather fragments and make her life whole.
In 1997, after 17 years away, Ray (Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, 1999) came back to “my grandmother’s heart-pine house, amid tobacco fields and cow pastures in Spring Branch, a farming section in northern Appling County, Georgia.” She had with her a son and a lot of memories, not all of them good. Those many years before she had gladly left a family “proud, fervently religious, marred by lunacy, suspicious . . . doomed to isolation,” but she felt a tug of duty and an obligation to honor the place, land, kin, and history, a desire to experience the human spirit of an agrarian community. Ray finds both community and sense of place eroded and compromised: the woods have been clear-cut, the historic buildings in town bulldozed, the crossroads turned into four-lane highways to somewhere else, the local school closed. She also finds lasting beauty on the landscape, a steady local economy, and a cast of genuine country dwellers. With a casual lyricism, the author unravels the intricate and intriguing longleaf pine ecosystem, from the wiregrass that burns to keep the trees regenerating to the Chickasaw plums and tannin-wracked rivers, red-cockaded woodpecker and peach-colored clay. She lights a little more fire under her writing when it comes to human behavior, and not just in scorning the rapaciousness of the lumber companies, but in tribute to the old system of barter and obligation that still holds, promoting mutual beneficence, trust, and balance. With a fine quilter's hand, Ray weaves new stories (of music festivals, riverkeepers, referendums, her son moving north, her whole unusual family) into the rapidly diminishing store of old ones.
Though it ends with a grace note as her mother and father sow their land with longleaf, in essence it’s an elegy for a ravaged place without a needle to its compass.Pub Date: May 22, 2003
ISBN: 1-57131-272-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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