A heartfelt, painful family saga, skillfully told by a survivor.
Essayist Handler debuts with a memoir of loving sibling bonds cruelly interrupted.
The author’s eight-year-old sister Susie died of leukemia in 1969, when Handler was ten. Their sister Sarah had been ill since infancy with Kostmann’s Syndrome, a bone-marrow disorder like leukemia, but much more rare; she died at age 27 in 1992. Yet Susie and Sarah were at her 1998 wedding, the author avers. They remain vividly present in memory, appearing in the waking reveries and sleeping dreams of their healthy sibling. The girls’ parents were liberal Yankee Jews transplanted to suburban Atlanta in the ’60s. They lived with their children on “a lush street where professors and doctors grew big gardens and tied bandannas around the necks of their Irish setters.” Dad, a crusading labor lawyer, was terrified by his daughters’ illnesses. He went a bit mad, was hospitalized, fled to the Far East and then returned for a divorce. (Perhaps, Handler muses, Dad was angry with her for having a future.) Mom pretended all was well, but the entire family was plunged into darkness by the deaths of two daughters. The author’s stark, lucid prose probes what those losses did to her parents and to her. Handler moved from Atlanta’s Coca-Cola society to the coke culture of Los Angeles. She maintained a journal and kept pertinent ephemera. In 2004-05, she obtained and pored over copious medical files on her sisters’ symptoms, medications and clinical trials. With a sure grasp of revelatory detail, the author recalls homely verities from a vanished life. Her memory piece is an elegy for her dead sisters, who are not quite lost as long as they live in her thoughts.
A heartfelt, painful family saga, skillfully told by a survivor.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-58648-648-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
A tenacious attempt to answer the question, “How do ordinary little human cogs make up a torture machine?”
Through the grim travails of one of Saddam Hussein’s top generals, journalist Steavenson (Stories I Stole, 2003) examines the dictator’s edifice of totalitarianism and moral corruption.
Taking her title from a verse of the Koran promising to mete out justice even to the “weight of a mustard seed,” the author weaves a fascinating account of how good men went terribly wrong. Steavenson worked as a journalist in Baghdad in 2003–04 and continued her interviews of exiled Iraqis in London and elsewhere, probing deeply into the stories of former Baath Party officials. Through a high-level Iraqi doctor who had served in the medical corps during the course of four Iraqi wars, the author was put in touch with the surviving family of Kamel Sachet, a commander of the special forces and general in charge of the army in Kuwait City during the Gulf War. The general was shot as a traitor by order of the Iraqi president in 1998. Born to an illiterate family in 1947, Sachet became a policeman and then joined the special forces, rising through the ranks to major. He distinguished himself during the Iran-Iraq war, gaining Hussein’s trust but also his occasional ire, which led to prison and torture. Sachet led the assault into Kuwait, but with the retreat and subsequent scourge by the United States, he became disillusioned with the violence and bloodshed and retired as a devout Muslim. Steavenson ably explores his and others’ obedience in fulfilling the dictator’s grisly demands, echoing works by Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi and Stanley Milgram.
A tenacious attempt to answer the question, “How do ordinary little human cogs make up a torture machine?”Pub Date: March 17, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-172178-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Collins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
A pleasure for men entering autumn, and for anyone who knows how to flick a line.
Meditations on the art of angling, mortality and more in one of those charged places where meditations come easily—Yellowstone National Park.
Yellowstone is now in the news for its disconcertingly rumbling volcanoes, but Wetherell (Soccer Dad: A Father, a Son, and a Magic Season, 2008, etc.) inclines to timelessness and the eternal verities, since he is confronting the specter of turning 55, “the real big 5-5, not the phony big 5-0 that I had passed in a breeze.” When a man of a certain leaning has to face such portentous moments, he does so with reel in hand. “For most people,” writes the author, “trout fishing is a much handier motive than philosophy.” That sentiment echoes Norman Maclean, the great philosopher of American rivers, but Wetherell does more than echo. He offers a refreshingly original set of observations on all manner of things, particularly the advance of years, which men are supposed to endure stoically and with mouths clamped shut. Echoes of Robert Bly and Iron John? Some, but there’s none of Bly’s touchy-feely, drum-circle squishiness here. Instead, Wetherell recommends that men of his age light out for the territory, as Roald Amundsen set off for the poles and, at 54, dreamed of traversing the Arctic in a zeppelin. Men of his age, arthritic but increasingly wise, are not supposed to spend much time staring into mirrors, Wetherell counsels, even though, as he notes in passing, Montaigne wisely said, “Old age plants more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.” Looking into a glassy trout stream makes for a seemly substitute. So Wetherell, pondering the history and meaning of wild Yellowstone, concludes that fishing is what matters in life, and ties on a “big Wooly Bugger and [plays] the chuck-and-duck game instead.”
A pleasure for men entering autumn, and for anyone who knows how to flick a line.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8032-1130-8
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
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