A quiet memoir with emotional power that is subtle, artful, and piercing.
The author of the honored novel The Archivist (1998) returns with a sometimes-wrenching memoir-in-essays about love and loss.
Cooley (English/Adelphi Univ.; Thirty-Three Swoons, 2005, etc.), a translator and an editor for the literary journal A Public Space, writes here about a caesura of 14 months in a small Italian village with her husband, a period that gave her time to travel a bit, to ruminate about loss (a writer friend, the decline of her parents, an ill neighbor who lives in a castle in the town, and more). The author also writes about local events (the wreckage of a cruise ship lies not far away) and animals (cats, birds, a fox that kills some goslings), and she quotes many lines from notable poets, including T.S. Eliot (principally), Whitman, Dickinson, Galway Kinnell, among others. Cooley moves stealthily around in time, using the shifts as both ally and enemy. She uses time to tell her story, shaping it to fit her needs, but she also fears time and what it has done and continues to do. (Her father suffers from Alzheimer’s; her mother has gone slowly blind; she thinks about her own aging.) Cooley also shifts tenses frequently and even changes person: in one affecting passage, she employs the “you” of the second person. Throughout, the author navigates leisurely through her year abroad, recounting how she and her husband drove to the mountains to hike, visited the local cemetery, interacted kindly with feral cats, ate local food, and tried to work on a new novel. But visitors from her memory keep intruding and demanding her attention. Most prominent among them are her parents, now in an assisted living facility, and the author is devastated that she is losing them both.
A quiet memoir with emotional power that is subtle, artful, and piercing.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-936787-46-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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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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BOOK REVIEW
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