Elicits smiles for the author’s self-awareness—and winces for his lack of it.
A translator of Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe, documentary filmmaker, writer and academic summarizes and assesses his peripatetic life.
Beginning with his departure from Tucson, Ariz., to enter Harvard University in the late 1950s and ending with his ascent last year of Takao Mountain, Nathan (Japanese Cultural Studies/Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; Japan Unbound: A Volatile Nation’s Quest for Pride and Purpose, 2004, etc.) is not always a likable narrator. He can be charming and self-deprecating: He tells delightful stories about his failures in Hollywood, including some humiliating encounters with producer Irwin Allen and an ominous one with O.J. Simpson, whose “savage power under tenuous control” Nathan noted. He can also, perhaps intentionally, reveal a porcine profile. He writes about his pricey homes, his large salaries and royalties for various projects (including commercials for AT&T), his youthful boorishness in Japanese bars, his situational ethics and his inappropriate relationships with young female students early in his career. He charts the courses of two marriages and describes the difficulties of long separations from his wife and children mandated by his various professional projects. Nathan also reveals an ego in need of trimming. He felt insufficiently celebrated at Oe’s Nobel ceremony; he faults an associate for the financial failure of a film business; he delights in quoting flattering letters and comments, especially from celebrities; he wonders if translation is an art, too. Despite all these disagreeable qualities, his memoir contains numerous pleasurable passages. The accounts of his ongoing struggles to understand the Japanese, his amusing description of a softball game with Saul Bellow (who comes off as even more boorish than Nathan) and his misery and self-flagellation after the dissolution of his first marriage reveal a capacious heart and mind concealed beneath a carapace of crassness and self-regard.
Elicits smiles for the author’s self-awareness—and winces for his lack of it.Pub Date: March 18, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5345-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
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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