Obviously limited in its format, but these motivating quotes bring together the rousing thoughts of a global leader.
A stirring collection of quotes from the Nobel Peace Prize winner.
Spanning several decades, this series of quotes from Mandela (Conversations with Myself, 2010, etc.) offers readers a compendium of wisdom reduced to bite-size nuggets. Pulled from personal letters to his wife, conversations with important world leaders, segments of speeches given at various official functions, notes from Long Walk to Freedom and other sources, these quotes give insight into the ever-hopeful mind of Mandela. Regardless of his own struggles, which included nearly three decades in prison, he continued to look upward and outward for his South Africa, believing that in the end, good would prevail. "No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion,” he writes. “People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” Divided into four segments—struggle, victory, wisdom, and future—the book shows in brief the evolution of thinking this man confronted before, during and after his term in prison and into his "retirement." Although more background information on the man himself would be useful to those not familiar with Mandela's story, the quotes are inspirational and moving, regardless of any prior knowledge. An emotive introduction by Archbishop Desmond Tutu elaborates on the book, as he writes that the quotes are "like a visit with our most eminent global elder, who generously offers his wisdom for all to learn." The full script of Mandela's Nobel acceptance speech from 1993 rounds out this brief yet important look into the mind of a man determined to break apartheid regardless of the personal cost.
Obviously limited in its format, but these motivating quotes bring together the rousing thoughts of a global leader.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-7539-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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