Laskas is an endearing, scrambled character, her swarming thoughts torturing readers as they torture her.
A chattery yet appealing return to the turf of Fifty Acres and a Poodle (2000): the author’s life on and off Sweetwater Farm in Scenery Hill, Pennsylvania.
No longer plagued by country mouse/city mouse doubts, Laskas is taking to her rural existence. “I am really happy,” she writes, simple words so many wish they could say. “I love living here. Driving around, you feel like you've entered a very good dream.” Then, to her husband Alex, “I'm happy. I'm madly in love with you. I often feel like the luckiest person alive to have this life.” By now, readers are getting the point: (1) Laskas is happy; (2) she likes to cover the ground thoroughly, like a blue tick working a scent. Inevitably, there is a snake in her Eden: her mother’s sudden paralysis. Laskas, the youngest child in her family, is hit broadside, seeing Mom as a “helpless bird” and herself as the “Utterly Useless Sister” (though her bedside presence is anything but). As her mother recovers, Laskas notices that “the more I stand here caring for my mother, the more of her helplessness I see, the more mother I seem to become.” The 40-year-old author wants a child of her own, but her eggs aren't what they used to be, nor is her 50-something husband’s sperm. Difficult as it is, Laskas manages to find the humor in failed in-vitro fertilization: “And my story, at the moment, is a used needle in a Wal-Mart bathroom.” (It’s a long story.) The couple decides to adopt a Chinese child, and no matter how tired readers are of the author’s mutts and neighbors, they will probably fall hard for her first meeting with her daughter. “Right. I know what to do. Of course I do. Here goes. This is what a mother does. I open my arms, and she falls in.”
Laskas is an endearing, scrambled character, her swarming thoughts torturing readers as they torture her.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2003
ISBN: 0-553-80263-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003
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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