Lively and lovely. Making these available to the English-speaking world is a great public service.
The gentle, intelligent voice of Galileo’s daughter speaks across the centuries in 124 remarkable epistles—published for the first time in English—written to her father in the early 17th century.
In 1613, when daughters Virginia and Livia were 13 and 12, respectively, Galileo placed them in Florence’s Convent of San Matteo, operated by the religious order called the Poor Clares. (Both Editor Sobel [Galileo’s Daughter, 1999, etc.] and the publisher are donating all proceeds from this book to the Poor Clares of New Mexico.) When the girls turned 16, they both took vows and new names. Virginia became Suor Maria Celeste; Livia, Suor Arcangela. In one of the fortuitous coincidences of history, the later letters in this collection come from the period when Galileo appeared before the Inquisition and was forced to deny the validity of the Copernican system. Maria Celeste’s fear for her father’s safety permeates virtually every line of these letters, even when she is writing about such mundane affairs as the health of a mule or the condition of her teeth. (“Recently I pulled a very large molar, which had rotted and was giving me great pain.”) Maria Celeste displays enormous veneration for Galileo. She addresses him as “Most Illustrious Lord Father” and throughout employs the most respectful tone and diction that Italian will allow. (The English translations are accompanied by the original-language versions on facing pages.) Occasionally she chides him very gently for not visiting often enough, for failing to write often enough, or for neglecting his health. She warns him about the presence of the plague in Florence, sending “a marvelous defense,” a concoction consisting of figs, nuts, rue, salt, and honey. Like any other child away from home, she asks for money, sympathy, care packages, and respect.
Lively and lovely. Making these available to the English-speaking world is a great public service.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2001
ISBN: 0-8027-1387-4
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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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