Both heartfelt and conflicted, Young’s passion for cars is tempered by his environmental conviction, a prescient reminder...
Young (Waging Heavy Peace, 2012) returns to reflect on the two defining love affairs of his life: cars and dogs.
The author’s interest in cars dates back to when he was a young boy riding around in his family’s 1948 Monarch Business Coupe with his dog Skippy tucked away in the car’s trunk. Perhaps the reason cars made such an impression on him is that the family moved around so often, developing a sense of itinerancy that fostered a love of being on the road. Young’s many road trips, however, allow him to retroactively calculate the emissions pumped into the atmosphere. This recurring diversion awkwardly interrupts the narrative, but Young feels obliged to include it due to his eco-conscious beliefs. It’s an interesting juxtaposition: the author’s love of cars against his awareness of the ecological damage caused by fossil fuel consumption. Nevertheless, Young reveals that his interest in cars was always about their aesthetic appeal, and it was not merely limited to the newest and most streamlined vehicles. The author admits that what really caught his eye were cars with an indescribable uniqueness, which often attracted him to “clunkers.” These cars spoke to Young, holding a romantic sway over him. Among his favorites was the black hearse that functioned as the Squires’ unofficial tour bus, as well as a 1957 Corvette he purchased to reward himself after his first taste of success with Buffalo Springfield. The plaintive and straightforward approach to Young’s remembrances evokes a kindly paternalism as he candidly recounts details of his experiences forging his musical ambition in Canadian clubs, the hippie scene in Los Angeles, his later solo career and the innumerable rides that took him there. Ultimately, Young issues a warning about our dependence on fossil fuels and the resultant threat of climate change while showcasing new and efficient alternative fuel systems.
Both heartfelt and conflicted, Young’s passion for cars is tempered by his environmental conviction, a prescient reminder that the Earth is more important than a hobby.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0399172083
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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