A bit of general Americana and the ghosts of one family that settled comfortably for a while in a place between Chicago and...
A Midwestern journalist shakes his family tree and discovers a crop of distinctly American characters.
Not far from St. Louis is the hamlet of Edwardsville, Ill., where “you’d swear that nothing had ever happened there more dramatic than a passing thunderstorm.” For the forbears of Sandlin (Storm Kings: The Untold History of America's First Tornado Chasers, 2013, etc.), it was their town, and the old house on Second Avenue built by great-grandfather “Bosh” Sehnert, scion of mid-19th-century immigrants from Germany, was their refuge. Bosh was a bit odd; great-grandmother Agnes was stolid. She had been the best chambermaid in Bosh’s Sehnert Hotel, now long gone. Resident in their house adjacent to the railroad tracks was brother George, a talented brewmaster. There, Bosh and Agnes boarded their grandchildren through the bucolic summers for many memorable years. There, Hilda and Mary kept the house through successive years of Independence Days and Decoration Days, Christmases and Easters. Wars came and passed, and eventually, electricity, radio and indoor plumbing arrived. The quotidian, mundane stories, the births, marriages and deaths, are augmented by precisely drawn character sketches, town gossip and household yarns. At bottom all about everyday folk, the stories are related with a fine elegiac sensibility. A parking lot is where the house once stood. In a synthesis of family lore and popular culture, Sandlin expands his genealogy of a conventional family into something considerably more.
A bit of general Americana and the ghosts of one family that settled comfortably for a while in a place between Chicago and the Mississippi provide an amalgam that now and again buttresses important matters known to all of us.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-345-80676-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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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