A perfectly pitched tale of survival and the courage to move on.
In this sequel to the acclaimed Blackbird (2000), Lauck continues her disquieting, provocative memoir of a struggle to survive family treachery, abuse, and tragedy.
She picks up her story in 1975, when 11-year-old Jennifer and older brother Bryan are rescued by relatives from their cruel and capricious stepmother, Deb. Jennifer is sent to live with their dead father’s younger sister Peggy and her husband Dick in Black Sparks, Nevada. Aunt Peggy is a tightly wound woman subject to bursts of searing anger; Uncle Dick is a mean-spirited bully. Bryan, who has been taken in by Uncle Leonard and his wife Sylvia, an equally loathsome couple, now lives with them in Oklahoma. Jennifer tries to adjust to her new situation, as she helps out with baby Kimmy and does chores, but finds life little easier with Peggy and Dick than it was with Deb. The family moves to Washington State, where adolescent Jennifer finds her social life frequently limited by rigid strictures on socializing and by excessive work demands. She must call Dick Dad, and Peggy Mom, because they have officially adopted her. At the court hearing they promised to save Jennifer’s Social Security benefits so she could go to college, but when she graduates from high school, she learns they haven’t. She works two jobs while attending the local community college and moves out as soon as she can. But, despite her growing independence, a brief marriage, and a successful career as a journalist, she continues to be distressed by her troubled relationship with Bryan, who once claimed she made sexual advances to him. He enters a seminary, drops out, enrolls in college and then in 1984 commits suicide. By 2000, though happily remarried, Lauck decides to learn why Bryan killed himself, and in the search finds answers that explain and comfort.
A perfectly pitched tale of survival and the courage to move on.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-7434-3965-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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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