Childhood memories with a nightmarish tinge.
An Appalachian memoir suffused with atomic energy.
Early on in this brief narrative, Freeman (Sociology/Simon Fraser Univ.; Longing for the Bomb: Oak Ridge and Atomic Nostalgia, 2015) writes, “I want to revive a peculiar genre—sociological poetry,” a term she attributes to C. Wright Mills in describing James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. This book is substantively different than Agee’s, though it has plenty of photos (Agee collaborated with the famed photographer Walker Evans), drawings, and assorted cultural references. It is more like a tone poem, a slim volume filled with very short sections—vignettes, memories—that seem to follow no chronological pattern yet keep circling back to the fact that in her grandparents’ hometown of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, nuclear power was ubiquitous, like oxygen, so you barely noticed it. It was only in retrospect that the author realized the deadly connection between this “secret city engineered by the United States government,” with the deceivingly pastoral name, and the atomic destruction of Hiroshima. “For those of us in its orbit,” she writes, “its spinning is our spinning; its hard acorn body, always already full of future potential, is also our collective body, as we embody culture and place.” Within the book’s analytical orbit, Walter Benjamin and Icarus connect with R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” and Adam Bomb from the Garbage Pail Kids finds something of a kindred spirit in the comic-book superhero Captain Atom. Readers also learn that the co-founder of Waffle House “worked as a counterintelligence agent for the U.S. government during the Manhattan Project,” and the author’s own grandfather was an atomic courier, driving his truck full of secret cargo. The result is by no means an anti-nuclear polemic, but the cumulative impact of the matter-of-fact sections gives readers a Cold War chill at the cultural pervasiveness of such destructive energy.
Childhood memories with a nightmarish tinge.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5036-0689-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Redwood Press/Stanford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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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