Leave it to Heller to have a bout with paralysis and death that brims with life and humor. The story of his struggle with Guillain-Barré syndrome—a rare, debilitating polyneuritis—is harmoniously co-written by the author of Catch 22 and the old friend who became his valet, secretary, business manager, and part-time nurse. The inscrutable fears and cosmic injustices in Heller's fiction here become real, but the account of his fall and resurrection, though frightening, is always hopeful, even joyful. The subject is not disease, but the good things in life: friendship, romance, freedom, Chinese food. Along with objective observations of his stubbornly disobedient body, Heller relates his efforts to pitch woo while paralyzed and tells how the disease became an issue at his unfriendly divorce proceedings. Throughout, Heller is witty and wonderful. Once a cheerful gourmand, he is reduced to taking all his meals through a tube. When a nurse offers to pour some champagne through his tube at New Year's, he passes in deference to his unwell body, noting "Besides, I never could abide the taste of any but the best champagne." Another of the frustrations of paralysis is not being able to bite one's fingernails. Vogel—former herring taster, former textiles executive, former sculptor—writes with clarity and humor, if with less stylistic bravado than his novelist buddy. The collaboration—done in alternating chapters, with occasional hilarious cross-interjections—is effective. Among other things, Vogel's candid appreciation of Heller's legendary grumpiness gives dimension to the story. Both authors would have us believe they were simply two men who didn't have any choice. Was Heller courageous in the face of his devastating disease? He notes sardonically that he couldn't have flailed his arms, beat the ground, or put a pistol to his head if he had wanted to—after all, he was paralyzed. Was Vogel selflessly devoted to his longtime buddy? Hell, he didn't have a job anyway, and he got to live in Heller's great apartment, wear Heller's clothes, sign Heller's checks, and even take out Heller's girlfriend. Their literary collaboration is just as fortuitous. Heller is sharply observant and amusing, even in a hospital bed. Vogel is a character, and handy with anecdotes. Beneath its sarcasms, then, an enjoyable, life-affirming account of friendship and courage.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1985
ISBN: 0743247175
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
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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