A deeply felt, unforgettable story that will linger in readers’ imaginations.
A writer returns home to work at his family’s farm in rural Ireland and records day-to-day struggles and triumphs throughout his first season.
In this thoughtfully observed and poignant debut memoir, Connell paints a remarkably authentic portrait of farm life in all its harshness and beauty. His story begins in January as he is about to deliver his first calf on his own. He describes the long, painstakingly intense procedure before he successfully delivered the calf, followed by the equally difficult task of helping the newborn to feed. This experience sets the tone for the engrossing narrative that follows, as Connell recounts the many challenging moments he faced over the next several months. These included the births and deaths of various livestock, endless feeding and cleaning, and protecting the animals from varied and unpredictable forces of nature. “The work is so relentless that I have forgotten I have lived other lives or that other lives exist,” writes Connell. “There is only the yard and cows and the mountain of chores before me.” The author also shares his internal struggle with his identity and family, in particular the difficult ties with his father, who has been mentor and guide and occasionally his harshest critic. Connell returned to the farm following a 10-year absence working as a journalist and film producer and living abroad, all the while preserving a longing for the farm life he left behind and struggling through periods of depression. Though the author vividly depicts the many hardships and grueling labor involved in running a farm, he maintains an open reverence for the intrinsic value of these efforts and a deep compassion for the animals and environment. “Farming,” he writes, “is a walk with survival, with death over our shoulder, sickness to our left, the spirit to our right and the joy of new life in front.”
A deeply felt, unforgettable story that will linger in readers’ imaginations.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-57799-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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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