While Swayze’s candor may prove unpalatable for some, her memoir makes a worthy addition to the canon of literature that...
The wife of actor Patrick Swayze (1952–2009) shares bittersweet memories of caring for her husband during his battle with cancer.
Although the cover shows the author smiling as she pets a horse, the narrative reveals a much more complex story about the love that sustained a couple through a 34-year marriage. Swayze pulls no punches as she recounts the rocky patches that she navigated with her star husband. In 2003, his drinking became so problematic that she finally left; even after reuniting a year later, the two struggled to recapture their early romance. All that changed, however, when Swayze was diagnosed with cancer in early 2008. Always a devoted partner throughout their many endeavors, the author redirected her energy to arranging top medical care, assisting Swayze during the filming of a TV series and tackling home-nursing responsibilities. With unflagging cheer and the quality of “Sisu” (courage) so esteemed by her Finnish family, she undoubtedly made her husband’s final days as comfortable as possible, and her earnest narrative conveys the deep love that she and her husband shared. Sadly, Swayze began to deteriorate in 2009, succumbing to a barrage of infections that weakened his already compromised immune system and made it impossible to continue chemotherapy. These portions of the book are incredibly painful to read, and the final chapter and epilogue are especially commendable for their refusal to indulge in platitudes: “I wish I had something good, or enlightening, or even remotely encouraging to say about the process of losing someone. But I don’t. There is nothing fun about it, nothing good, nothing hopeful.”
While Swayze’s candor may prove unpalatable for some, her memoir makes a worthy addition to the canon of literature that honestly assesses grief without sentimentalizing it.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9635-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
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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