An intriguing, occasionally overly detailed portrait of the life and times of the Trillings and the liberal circles of which...
The life and times of Diana Trilling (1905-1996), the wife and collaborator of celebrated literary critic Lionel Trilling and an important opinion-shaper in her own right.
The Trillings were at the center of the New York intellectual scene from the turbulent 1930s until Diana’s death in 1996. Robins (Copeland’s Cure: Homeopathy and the War Between Conventional and Alternative Medicine, 2005, etc.) contends that while Lionel, a Columbia University professor and popular short story writer, “was admired as one of America’s most influential and original literary critics,” Diana’s role in their joint output is all-too-frequently overlooked. Diana’s own literary contributions as an editor and writer were impressive, and she published six books, including the bestseller Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor (1981). As Robins also notes, her reviews and essays were “published in dozens of prominent magazines,” including the Partisan Review, Harper’s, Vogue, and the Nation. Lionel died in 1975, but Diana didn’t release her memoir, The Beginning of the Journey, until 1993. However, she chose not to reveal the truth of how much effort she had put into her husband’s work, including the formulation of his text as well as editing and rewriting. As Robins writes, “Lionel’s work was her work throughout his life. There simply was no time for her own.” The prominence of the Trillings as noncommunist intellectuals was underscored by an invitation to a dinner at the Kennedy White House. Making use of Diana’s extensive archives, which had been mostly forgotten, Robins does a solid job of rehabilitating a significant literary and cultural figure of the 20th century, a woman who spent much of her career in her husband’s shadow.
An intriguing, occasionally overly detailed portrait of the life and times of the Trillings and the liberal circles of which they were a part.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-231-18208-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
