Sometimes rueful, often oblique, but provocative and highly readable.
A winding but elegant valediction from Diski (What I Don’t Know About Animals, 2011, etc.), known as a literary journalist and chronicler in England, now resigned to a short tenure on Earth as a “canceree.”
What is the proper response when the doctor delivers the grim news of an inoperable tumor, an aggressive and untreatable blood condition? The author ponders all the “cancer clichés” that are available to her, deciding on the one hand that she has no major ambitions “except perhaps just lie back and enjoy the morphine” but also concluding that any choice is really not an exercise in free will as much as it is “picking one’s way through an already drawn flow-chart.” A central figure in her book—more broadly a memoir of intellectual life in a turbulent era than the cancer diary that she first conceived of writing—is the writer Doris Lessing, who took Diski in during a more-than-conflicted adolescence and mined her experiences for her own fiction (“I suppose the fact that she got on with it made the story hers in some way”). Some of the best parts of the book recount table talk with the likes of Robert Graves, Alan Sillitoe, Lindsay Anderson, and R.D. Laing. Diski delivers bittersweetness and resentment in spades, as when she recalls shepherding Lessing’s “irritating adoratas from California or thereabout…[who] spoke of Doris as if she were a source of wisdom, and her every move significant.” Hopping and skipping across years and topics—“I don’t like writing narrative,” she protests, “the getting on with what happened next of a story that has a middle, an end, and a beginning”—Diski describes the daily indignities of the cancer patient against a swirling backdrop of mescaline, Dylan, Lennon, and other tropes of her youth, a time of which she deliciously wrote in her book The Sixties (2009).
Sometimes rueful, often oblique, but provocative and highly readable.Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63286-686-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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