A sympathetic biography of the celebrated mystery writer that focuses on her strange disappearance in 1926. Londoner Cade, who researched a BBC documentary about Christie’s disappearance, pored through archives and interviewed scores of friends, relatives, police officials, and others connected to the event. On December 4, 1926, Christie vanished from her home only to be found 11 days later living in a posh hotel under a false name. The implausible story she and her husband gave out at the time was that she was suffering from amnesia. Cade’s simple, quite convincing explanation is that, having been informed by her husband that their marriage was over, Christie staged the disappearance to punish him. By creating clues that suggested murder, she hoped the police would pick him up for questioning, thus embarrassing him and ruining his weekend with his mistress. Cade reveals how her closest friend helped her concoct her plan and carry it out. What she had not anticipated was the length of time required to locate her, the sensational press coverage that ensued, and the intense public interest and speculation that were aroused. She embarrassed not just her husband but herself and was deeply chagrined at being suspected of arranging a publicity stunt to help her book sales. Cade recounts particulars of the search, Christie’s anguish over the divorce that followed, and her subsequent marriage to another, also unfaithful husband. In tiresome detail he relates the plots, characters, and feelings expressed in her literary creations’some unremarkable romances under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott as well as the scores of mysteries for which she is best known—to painful episodes in her real life. First published in England in 1998, this uncritical biography provide a glimpse into the anguish of a writer who tried hard to keep her unhappy private life from public view. Ardent fans may be enthralled; she would be appalled. (31 b&w photos)
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7206-1055-9
Page Count: 258
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
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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