and keeps on happening, to this day. (First serial to Commonweal; author tour)
Illiterate adolescent peasant girl, prompted by inner voices, turns knight-redeemer of her country—temporarily. A life of the
martyr Joan of Arc (1412–31), presented (contradictions intact) by a lifelong admirer. Gordon (Seeing Through Places, 2000, etc.), whose works often portray women confronting faith, pinpoints how “Gift, chance, accident, coincidence” converged during the Hundred Years” War to manifest such a heroine, crusading to crown an unwilling Dauphin as God’s elect who would ransom France. Gordon highlights how Joan vindicated here prophetic status by manipulating symbols (her divinely designed battle standard, her armor, and her male dress) to leverage untrustworthy men: the king who soon shunned his champion, the companions-in-arms who fought then flitted, the French royals who sold her out, and the accusers who tried and burned her as a heretic. Gordon qualifies the myths surrounding this incredibly brave and resilient down-to-earth na‹f: Joan was surprised when a wound she “foretold” actually hurt, and shaken when confronted with war’s human misery. A chronology stresses the enforced brevity of Joan’s career: a fitful tactician alive only in action (when Joan let “her military judgment and her religious scruples” diverge), both her victories and her charisma vanished soon enough. Gordon (like Joan’s rehabilitators) does not discuss “the difficult issues of inspiration and its verification,” however, leaving us to wonder about the question that stands at the center of the legend: namely, whose heavenly directives are genuine? And who can we know? All contention is focused upon that strong unviolated female body, remote from standard hierarchies of sex, class, deference, chivalry, orthodoxy. Though analogies intended as timeless fall short (“Girls aren’t supposed to brag”), Gordon trenchantly discerns how virginity granted autonomy, and one senses that Joan’s mission required neither gender. Surveying the manifold purposes served by this idiosyncratic saint, Gordon characterizes her best: “the patroness of the vivid life.” A bold “biographical meditation” that persuades the skeptic to meditate on the inexplicable something Joan made happen,
and keeps on happening, to this day. (First serial to Commonweal; author tour)Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-88537-1
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
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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