Unexpectedly warm, intensely inspiring: a work for dreamers—and Leonard would say that means all of us.
Twelve lessons on how to become an artist and/or live your dream, as dictated by the author’s father, poet and teacher Leonard Wolf.
Feminist Naomi Wolf broke onto the literary scene as a young woman, producing The Beauty Myth (1991) when she was still in her 20s. No wonder—even her elementary-school poetry had been critiqued with rigor. And what a critic she must have had. Despite its having been mediated through his daughter’s words and stretched to fit every student, his philosophy makes Leonard Wolf come across with the force of a thunderbolt, as an electric, commanding teacher. He is, Wolf says, a man who has always lived outside of convention, one who still inspires everyone he comes across—students, colleagues, casual acquaintances—to listen to their “heart's wisdom.” Even the family’s building superintendent learned to follow his dreams after speaking with Leonard. Still, like most children, the author spent many years fleeing her father’s dictums, though now, as a parent and teacher herself, she is eager to absorb his philosophy. And so, over the course of a single summer, he shares with her his essential lesson plan. His lessons—“Use Your Imagination,” “Do Nothing Without Passion,” “Pay Attention to the Details,” “Your Only Wage Will be Joy”—are illustrated by scenes from his life, challenges Wolf faces with her own students, and the Wolfs’ combined efforts to construct a solid tree house for Naomi’s daughter. Leonard’s peripatetic life, even without the accompanying philosophy, would make for good reading, and Naomi’s childhood, too, is unexpectedly entertaining, colored as it was by Leonard’s follow-your-heart philosophy. For cultural gossips, her story should be interesting if only for the glimpse of the fiery Naomi Wolf longing for a way to soften her voice and become a better listener.
Unexpectedly warm, intensely inspiring: a work for dreamers—and Leonard would say that means all of us.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-4977-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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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