Vignettes of a life recovered, not deep but authentic.
Former Parade editor in chief Kravitz makes amends and spends a year living connectedly.
Reflecting on his life after losing his job, the author was not pleased with what he found—a workaholic living in self-exile not just from his family but his greater life. He felt diminished because of his firing, and he felt guilty about the important things he dropped by the wayside: family and friends, a broad curiosity, an inclusive worldview. “As good as my life looked on paper,” he writes, “it was sorely lacking in the one area that puts flesh on meaning: human connectedness.” So the author devoted an entire year to tying up loose emotional ends. Despite being fearful and anxious, he reached out to reconnect with family, friends and acquaintances—a schizophrenic aunt, a high-school teacher, friends he has been concerned about, an old nemesis, people along the way he has made promises to that have gone begging—and found many pleasing nuggets of gold. Though genuine, Kravitz’s writing has a high pitch—not desperate, but somewhere between hopeful and eager to please. On the surface, his journeys are not particularly exciting; there are no swooning epiphanies, and the results don’t fit comfortably into a paint-by-numbers philosophy. Nonetheless, they are truthful, generous and worthwhile. Through his experiences, he found meaning, an acceptance of life’s absurdity and the insight that so much comes down to attitude and keeping the many threads of life thrumming.
Vignettes of a life recovered, not deep but authentic.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59691-675-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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