A beautifully written and emotionally sound look back—and forward—from a woman who has broken the glass ceiling and lived to...
This memoir includes anecdotes, self-analysis, and original poetry from a Vermont politician and author as she embarks on her eighth decade.
Kunin (Living a Political Life, 1994, etc.) broke the rules in a major way more than two decades ago as Vermont’s first elected female governor. She also served as deputy secretary of education during President Bill Clinton’s administration and spent three years as the United States ambassador to Switzerland. But not even this dynamo can reverse the aging process. In her fourth book, the author looks ahead to age 84 and beyond. She reflects on the late-in-life romance with her second husband, John, whom she met in her 70s and his 80s. (After they agreed to get married, John told Kunin, “I can give you ten years,” and she mused, “That seemed like forever.”) When John was stricken with health problems and subsequently confined to a wheelchair, he and Kunin made the decision to sell their condo and move to a cottage in a retirement village. As the author cared for her ailing husband and packed up the remains of their old life, she thought about her career and relationships, not just with John, but also with her brother, Edgar, who was a thriving politician and writer before he died. Kunin intersperses ruminations and stories of daily life with John with original poetry contemplating the veins in her hands and the arrival of autumn. A veteran of working in government as well as writing books, the author chooses her words carefully, using prose that is short and to the point but no less powerful. Her poetry is just as lovely, particularly “Can There Be More to Say,” a look at a morning marital conversation. Kunin’s take on “coming of age” as an elderly woman rather than an adolescent is unique and should appeal to readers young and old. Her tales of her mother, a Jewish immigrant who brought her two children to America after her husband’s suicide, are both poignant and indicative of the success stories Kunin and Edgar would become in adulthood.
A beautifully written and emotionally sound look back—and forward—from a woman who has broken the glass ceiling and lived to write about it.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9994995-9-7
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Green Writers Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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