A low-key, well-balanced tribute.
Former president Carter (Beyond the White House: Waging Peace, Fighting Disease, Building Hope, 2007, etc.) affectionately remembers his mother, the redoubtable Miss Lillian.
When he was governor of Georgia, Carter visited her at the family home in Plains. “Mama,” he confided, “I’ve decided to run for president.” “President of what?” she wanted to know. On reflection, she admitted, “Well I was pleased. I figured that if he was elected president, someone would open a good restaurant in Plains.” Blunt without malice and disarmingly unfettered, Lillian Carter was a powerful force, remembered here by her son with not only fondness, but great respect for her role as an agent for good. She shared whatever fortune she had without making a big deal of it; knew a bum when she saw one (Joseph McCarthy, for instance, and not the tramps who knocked on her farmhouse door during the Depression); and “just ignored the pervasive restraints of racial segregation.” When her husband died in 1953, the author noted that she “seemed to be searching for whatever was provocative, adventurous, challenging, and gratifying.” Thus she spent eight years as a housemother to a rowdy Auburn University frat, lent her nursing talents to the Peace Corps for two years in a small village in India and became her son’s goodwill ambassador. While she tirelessly campaigned for her son and served as the face of his administration on countless occasions, mostly state funerals, she also took care of herself, tuning out the world when her chosen soap opera aired and enjoying a strong toddy in the late afternoon. The author isn’t shy to note that Miss Lillian could be high maintenance—“She was quite harsh in her criticism when any of us failed to make a regular pilgrimage to pay our respects”—but Carter makes it clear that she passed on her unvarnished decency and sense of fair play to her son.
A low-key, well-balanced tribute.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6245-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
