A bleak, often heart-wrenching account of two children who made their own way during a difficult time with difficult people.
Vaughan’s debut memoir recalls her and her brother’s childhoods.
In this memoir of growing up during the Depression and World War II in Indiana, Vaughan explores her relationships with family members. Her bedrock was her older brother, Genie. Together they navigated their complex school-year lives in Marion, Ind., with two hardworking, stressed parents who couldn’t make ends meet despite their three jobs. Vaughan and Genie spent summers on a 40-acre farm with their loving maternal grandparents and the “Old Ones,” their grandmother’s problematic, not-so-loving parents. Their summers were not bucolic adventures. The near 100-year-old great-grandfather suffered from dementia, occasionally shooting at his great-grandchildren for sport. Their great-grandmother was a mean-spirited harpy who took delight in hurling verbal abuse at her daughter, Florrie. The farm provided the setting for most of Genie and Vaughan’s adventures with a rotating cast of badly behaved animals—mainly acquired by Grandpa in ill-advised trades—that added challenges and hilarity to the children’s summers. Particularly memorable is Big Red, the raping rooster, who was ultimately executed. Genie’s imagination further sustained them; he treated Vaughan as his corporal as they carried out missions around the house to keep it safe from Nazi invaders. Meanwhile, Genie also kept his sister safe from bullies at home. A realistic snapshot of troubled family life 60 years ago, this is book is appropriate for YA and adult readers. The author and Genie garner sympathy as they deal with far weightier matters—abuse, death, deprivation—than children their ages should encounter. Genie was not just his younger sister’s protector and caretaker but a young man admired by his peers, who was able to transcend poverty and self-consciousness. Vaughan’s novel is a tribute to her beloved brother, as well as her loving grandparents.
A bleak, often heart-wrenching account of two children who made their own way during a difficult time with difficult people.Pub Date: June 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-1456375911
Page Count: 224
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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