A spirited and moving memoir about how “it’s never too late to try something new.”
An essayist and nonfiction writer’s account of how she was forced to start over after age 60.
In 2012, Maran (A Theory of Small Earthquakes, 2012, etc.) was preparing to leave the Oakland house where she had raised two sons and lived with her now-estranged wife. Facing a future with no money and less time to reinvent herself, she headed to the Los Angeles home of two friends. There, she slept on their couch while starting a new job as a copywriter for a clothing company staffed by stylish 20- and 30-somethings whose “good looks and confidence conjure[d] happy childhoods in interesting neighborhoods.” As her finances improved, Maran realized that she now had to rebuild a social life that living as part of one couple or another for more than 40 years had spared her from doing. A large social and professional network allowed her to quickly begin meeting others, and soon she turned into a “friendship speed dater.” Her life on the upswing, the author eventually moved into a rental cottage only to have the fragile stability she had created upset by divorce and the death of her father. Her LA friends then pushed her into the dating world. Maran reluctantly obliged by going to get her first Brazilian wax and then engaging in a post-marital one-night fling with a younger woman. Shortly afterward, she joined an online singles site and became involved with a beautiful 50-something businesswoman, Helena, who helped her deal with the unexpected loss of her job. The relationship was comfortable but not passionate, and in the end, Maran was forced to admit that she ultimately did not love Helena. By turns poignant and funny, the book not only shows how one feisty woman coped with a “Plan B life” she didn’t want or expect with a little help from her friends. It also celebrates how she transformed uncertainty into a glorious opportunity for continued late-life personal growth.
A spirited and moving memoir about how “it’s never too late to try something new.”Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-57413-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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