A new treat for Gilbert’s many fans.
Grateful readers tell why Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir became such a phenomenal success.
After Eat Pray Love was published in 2006, the author was overwhelmed by readers who told her that the book had changed their lives—but she didn’t know quite how. “It was only seeing the incredible range of submissions that came pouring in for this anthology that I finally got it,” she writes in the introduction. Most of the contributors repeated the same story: the book made them realize, “my life doesn’t have to look like this anymore.” That is the theme of the nearly 50 short essays—most by women—in a collection that is both inspiring and, for Gilbert, self-congratulatory. Many entries end by thanking “Liz,” as the writers often call her, for waking them up and convincing them that they “are allowed to change” and “to assert agency over the direction you go next.” Many writers were depressed, and all were feeling stuck and unsatisfied with their lives. Some were sick with HIV, cancer, anorexia, and other illnesses. Some were mired in bad marriages, many were bored, and others were fearful. “I learned to forgive myself for being scared and imperfect, for making mistakes,” one woman writes. “I stopped allowing myself to use those mistakes as an excuse to not try new things.” Self-affirmation is a recurrent theme: “Liz showed me that we cannot heal without loving our whole selves,” wrote a woman who had suffered debilitating back pain that made her feel “trapped” in her body. “Eat Pray Love gave me the chutzpah to jump into the ultimate unknowing,” said a woman suffering from late-stage Lyme disease, referring to her decision to enroll in an experimental stem cell treatment program in India. For some, the ultimate unknowing meant ending a marriage, setting out on travel, or, for one woman, signing up for six weeks of burlesque classes.
A new treat for Gilbert’s many fans.Pub Date: March 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-57677-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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