A genial volume about a fun approach to showing others how much they mean to you.
How writing letters helped the author better appreciate her life.
When freelance writer Kho (The Family Mix: Essays on Family Life From MidlifeMixtape.com, 2013) turned 50, she decided to mark the year by writing 50 letters to her family, friends, and anyone else who had motivated or guided her in her life. One of the first letters she wrote was to her father, an act that gained further significance when he was diagnosed with cancer. Through the act of writing, the author discovered forgotten moments that have shaped her life, making her even more grateful for having lived them, including those that caused pain. When she was done writing, she printed out copies of all the letters so she could read them and relive her thoughts, which reinforced the feelings of love and bounty that she obtained from these people and events. Kho’s personal story is intertwined with guidelines on how to start your own letter-writing project. She lists the obvious choices for such letters—among others, parents, siblings, spouses, children, extended family—but also provides other interesting choices, including a doctor or dentist, favorite artist or musician, or even an ex-partner. She notes that while many of these letters may never be sent to the recipient for one reason or another, it does not negate the positive effect of writing it. Kho also moves beyond people and includes places, hometowns, hobbies, ideas, etc. The last letter, she writes, should be to yourself as you think about all the previous letters you’ve written. Although emails, texts, and tweets have taken over much of life, this old-fashioned method of communication has the potential to increase one’s happiness as well as that of the recipient. Kho’s idea is simple and quaint and will appeal to those seeking to understand “the importance of expressing appreciation.”
A genial volume about a fun approach to showing others how much they mean to you.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7624-6845-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Running Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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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