Capably written, but cynical readers may raise an occasional eyebrow.
An English writer now in his 60s recalls his wild boyhood and his experiences in “minor seminary,” a secondary school for boys preparing to become Roman Catholic priests.
Cornwell has written previously on religious matters (Breaking Faith: The Pope, the People, and the Fate of Catholicism, 2001, etc.), and here he follows a somewhat familiar itinerary on his spiritual/religious journey: As an impoverished, troubled child, he seems slated for hell, then finds faith, loses it and later recovers it. Before leaving his family, his father bounced one low-paying job to another, as did irascible Mom. The author is well on his way to becoming a criminal (he fights, lies, fails at school), and then, most traumatically, is sexually assaulted by a stranger in a public restroom—an incident he reports only to a priest. In a waking dream, he sees Satan (“an ageless dark being”), who seems interested in the boy. Frightened, he becomes more involved in his church, and on a field trip to a priory begins to feel the call; then Jesus talks to him directly. Off he goes to Cotton Seminary (a boarding school), where he meets some classmates and at least one priest who wants to have sex with him. The boys kiss him (he likes it); the priest offers a manual inspection of his penis (he declines). But Cornwell finds a life-long friend, too, a priest who teaches English. The author battles his awakening sexual feelings throughout his school years. After graduation, he attends seminary briefly, hates it, quits, reads Darwin, becomes agnostic, heads off for undergraduate and graduate degrees at, respectively, Oxford and Cambridge. Cornwell, who says he based his memoir on “unaided personal recollections” (no diaries, etc.), remembers with remarkable clarity the daily events and conversations of a half-century ago.
Capably written, but cynical readers may raise an occasional eyebrow.Pub Date: June 13, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-51486-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
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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