A pointillist accumulation of moments that movingly invokes speculation, introspection, loss and its habitual companion,...
Fiction writer Gordon (Pearl, 2005, etc.) grapples with the legacy of her complex, troubled mother.
It’s a companion piece to the author’s 1996 memoir of her father, The Shadow Man. Like that earlier book, this is an impressionistic portrait. “I came to realize that I couldn’t see my mother properly by standing in one place,” writes Gordon, explaining her title. “I had to walk around her life, to view it from many points.” She opens and closes this journey with vignettes about painter Pierre Bonnard. In 2002, shortly before her mother’s death, Gordon traveled to Washington, D.C., to see a Bonnard exhibition, escaping from the grim reality of a parent so deep in dementia she had not recognized her daughter for at least five years. In between those two points, the author’s mother, Anna Gagliano Gordon, worked for decades as a legal secretary, not retiring until she was 75. She had uneasy relationships with her four sisters (one of whom the author despised) and a strange union with a man who couldn’t seem to lift off the launch pad: “They should never have married,” Gordon declares bluntly. Anna vacationed frequently with two close female friends and later took a few awkward trips to Europe with her daughter; at the Vatican, Mom met the Pope and said he smelled like raisins. She was a practicing, hopeful Roman Catholic who idolized several priests. At times, the author is brutal with herself. She wishes she had visited Anna more often during the final years in a nursing home; she regrets slapping her mother after a contretemps in Ireland. But when the nursing home called to say Anna had died, her daughter screamed.
A pointillist accumulation of moments that movingly invokes speculation, introspection, loss and its habitual companion, regret.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-42456-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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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