A warm, funny and compassionate memoir.
A memoir by acclaimed novelist and poet Alvarez (Once Upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA, 2007, etc.) about her pre- and post-earthquake travels around the island of Hispaniola and the Haitian boy who inspired them.
The author met Piti, a young migrant worker from Haiti, in 2001, on a chance visit to a coffee farm that bordered the one she and her husband owned in the Cordillera Central mountains of the Dominican Republic. Alvarez took an immediate liking to this “grinning boy with worried eyes” and began a friendship with him. She became close enough with him that she made a pledge that she would go to Haiti on the far-off, future day when he would marry—without ever thinking that she would be called upon to make good on her promise. In 2009, she received a surprise call from Piti telling her that she was invited to his wedding. Alvarez almost declined, but her attachment to the young boy won out and she and her husband returned to the Dominican Republic. As she traveled across the border, she experienced an epiphany: Haiti, though so close to her native Dominican Republic, was like the beautiful, tragic “sister” she had never fully understood. Eventually Piti called on Alvarez again, this time to help him care for his extended family in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. Taken together, the author’s trips to Hispaniola represent an interrupted, but no less powerful, voyage that forced her to confront her darkest imaginings.
A warm, funny and compassionate memoir.Pub Date: April 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61620-130-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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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