A bit about old television and a bit more about being Irish, all proficiently presented.
Toronto Globe and Mail television columnist Doyle debuts with a memoir featuring, among other things, an account of what he watched on the telly in the old country.
As a lad in Tipperary, young John witnessed the advent of TV in Ireland. For him, puberty and modern life arrived simultaneously: Bat Masterson and The Donna Reed Show, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Get Smart gave way only to airing of the daily angelus. Schooled by the Christian Brothers, he found the world of church, communion and confession informed and enlarged by broadcasts from elsewhere. “It was a mad, carefree way of life those people were living in America. They were afraid of nothing.” Not everyone was happy about it. As one politician famously declared, “There was no sex in Ireland before television.” And, while English Monty Python flew into Irish homes with its circus, more immediate matters also appeared on the screens. There, before all eyes, was the new rising against English rule in the North. Along with Upstairs, Downstairs, TV showed the struggles for Irish rights and women’s rights. It also deferentially presented the first papal visit to the land of St. Patrick, one broadcast that didn’t meet with the author’s approval. Despite all the evocative detail, television is simply the cement that binds a personal coming-of-age story. Doyle was quiet lad who watched and listened avidly to his parents and the colorful townsfolk in Nenagh Town and Carrick-on-Shannon. Then he was a Dubliner, a college student encountering famous poets and drinkers. Finally, he traveled across the Atlantic to become a Canadian, though he’ll always be an Irishman. Doyle writes with fine Hibernian garrulity and ease, not a bother on him. For an Irish narrative, he’s yer fella.
A bit about old television and a bit more about being Irish, all proficiently presented.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2007
ISBN: 0-7867-1814-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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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