A writer's perfunctory yet absorbing diary of his life in Tangiers. Lifelong ÇmigrÇ and novelist Hopkins (The Flight of the Pelican, 1984 etc.), fresh out of Princeton and convinced that Wall Street and the professions were not for him, jaunted around South America and Europe before finally pitching up in Morocco. There, on and off for 17 years, he pursued with gathering success his literary ambitions. Cheap, exotic, permissive, Morocco (especially Tangiers) was one of the places to be in the early '60s, especially for writers and artists and American millionaires. Now it all seems almost mythic, a great, outlandish American Bloomsbury. Hopkins delivers all the expected goodies and more: the requisite desert meditations (``This is what the desert does. It leaves you with a terrible nostalgia for the purity you left behind. That purity was you''), the kef-censed evenings in the kasbah, the celebrity sightings. Beyond the usual literary suspects such as his friends Paul and Jane Bowles and William Burroughs, we have everyone from Malcolm Forbes to Tennessee Williams to the Beatles. Though a graceful, laconic stylist, Hopkins is not a natural diarist. He lacks the necessary daily dedication, curiosity, and self-absorption. Months can pass between entries, creating any number of bothersome and confusing lacunae. And though he may have mingled with the rich and famous, Hopkins wastes no time elaborating. He is content, for example, merely to note that he attended a wild party where he met the Beatles, and leave it at that. Finally, in 1979, Hopkins made the difficult decision to leave Tangiers and move to England with his new, pregnant wife. It would be cold and gray, but at least he'd be closer to the English-language publishing worldwithout having to return to America. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 16, 1998
ISBN: 0-932274-50-1
Page Count: 244
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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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