Nightmarish memoir that gives fiction a run for its money.
The allure of Scottish history and legend woven through a tragic modern life.
Granted, it’s not and never was actually Macbeth’s castle: That lure for the unwary is based solely on Shakespeare’s warping of a careless chronicler’s embellishments on the life of an 11th-century Scottish king who died 300 years before the first stone was laid at Cawdor Castle, near Inverness. “The Fall of the House of Cawdor” would be an apt replacement subtitle, and one for which the author would not have to excuse any overstatement. Campbell’s memoir begins at her family’s estate in Wales, then moves to the chill and forbidding Scottish castle she would come to love. Edged with relentless wit, it unravels the life of her father, the 25th Thane of Cawdor (6th Earl of same), Hugh John Vaughan Campbell. Liza and her four siblings, including younger brother Colin, sole Cawdor heir per the British peerage’s practice of primogeniture, witnessed the gradual degeneration of their father’s marriage, his estate, his sanity and his health. Early on, his antics seemed merely Pythonesque: chasing anything in skirts, constantly drinking, especially while driving, and serially wrecking expensive cars. It was all quite puzzling to the kids, whose face time with Dad consisted mainly of humorous jabs inevitably followed by a sarcastic right cross. Only in his letters to Liza at school did a gentle, loving father occasionally reveal himself. Most of the time, though, he was a monster: At one hideous moment, he drunkenly orders her into his bed for what seems to be shaping up as an incestuous liaison until he passed out. On cocaine, it turns out, he drove his wife from their marriage and, prior to his 1990 death at 60 from cancer and a compromised immune system, secretly disinherited his son, effectively terminating forever the family’s cherished “title deed.”
Nightmarish memoir that gives fiction a run for its money.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-37477-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
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
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