The triumphs and challenges of the political arena shape an extraordinarily candid, often lyrical, memoir from former Vermont governor and current Deputy US Secretary of Education Kunin. Viewing her life through the prism of political involvement, the author, whose personal journey would seem sufficiently compelling for a more traditional narrative, instead delivers an alternately wry, intense, amusing, and elegant meditation on why anybody—from the standard male go-getter to a doctor's wife and mother of four like Kunin—would submit to the grinding pressures of public service. Born in Switzerland on the eve of Hitler's rise, Kunin, with her widowed mother and adored older brother, arrived in America at age six and gradually settled into the customary path for women of her generation, putting aside a fledgling career in journalism for marriage and family. Community and civic involvement led accidentally—and hilariously—to an unsuccessful race for the Burlington Board of Aldermen. It was the springboard for her ascent, in 12 short years, from freshman representative to first woman governor of the state. Sparing none of the gritty details of legislative infighting, the demands of juggling family and career, and the constant battle to control her ``political demons: fear, self-doubt, and paranoia,'' Kunin nevertheless conveys a passionate appreciation for the ``infinite possibility of politics,'' celebrated here as a deeply personal and simultaneously quite public art form (``...I could express my inner self in politics. Political action was a creative process, drawing on my emotions and intellect....''). Accordingly, Kunin's efforts on behalf of such cherished issues as education, the environment, child care, and women's rights are depicted as the inevitable culmination of observing of the surrounding world. Compulsory reading for anyone, male or female, who has ever pondered the mysteries of political life. (16 pages of b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41181-X
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
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
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