An intriguing glance at a complex and countercultural personality.
The tempestuous life of 20th-century America’s archprogressive, Dorothy Day (1897-1980).
Loughery (Dagger John: Archbishop John Hughes and the Making of Irish America, 2018) and Randolph (Amelia Earhart, 1990, etc.) provide a serviceable and largely balanced look at one of America’s most complex and socially influential figures. The authors begin with a protracted exploration of Day’s young adulthood, a period rife with cross-county moves, love affairs, and interactions with World War I–era radicals. Her development as a writer, thinker, and activist is intertwined with sometimes-salacious tales of her relationships with intelligent but immature men who too often caused her great pain. Eventually, Day’s plunge into Catholicism redirected her passions while confusing her friends and family. The authors move on to discuss Day’s encounter with mystic wanderer Peter Maurin and the ensuing creation of the Catholic Worker, at once a publication, a collection of communal homes, and a way of life. Moving through the militant 1930s and the desperate 1940s, the authors do a good job of locating Day’s life and work in the midst of a wide variety of colorful characters and contentious controversies. Day was a polarizing figure seemingly with everyone: the church, the government, and fellow activists alike. This reality did not abate as the century matured, though Day’s name moved on from being an FBI target to having near-celebrity status. Though Loughery and Randolph’s work does not provide the personal depth of Kate Hennessy’s exceptional Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty (2017), they do provide an excellent record of Day’s involvement in the progressive circles of her time. The authors touch on countless personalities within Day’s sphere of influence and use her as a focal point in their exploration of issues ranging from homelessness to homosexuality and historical events ranging from Sacco and Vanzetti to the Spanish Civil War.
An intriguing glance at a complex and countercultural personality.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982103-49-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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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