A lavish, often engaging personal account of the world, its peoples, and their local histories.
A long, sprawling combination of historical inquiry, autobiography, and travelogue that looks at the interplay of society and religion throughout history.
In his latest book, Kazan (The Day We Die, 2013, etc.) offers a sometimes-rambling but always engaging hybrid of historical discussion and personal revelation. He seeks to understand certain universal elements of human experience, and his essays range with ease from the intricacies of Central European history to the memes of hit movies. The author asserts that certain basic questions (“What is history?”; “Who are we?”) crop up repeatedly and that there are recurring obstacles to answering them—namely, “the duplicity and complicity of organized religion.” “Knowledge frees the individual,” he writes. “Oppositely, fear constrains.” Indeed, in the course of his complicated travels, he encounters a great deal of freedom and constraint. Whether he’s bicycling from Portugal to Turkey, seeking political asylum in Austria, graduating from the Romanian Air Force Academy, visiting the ancient Chinese city of Dali, or navigating the insane-seeming bureaucracy of his native Romania, Kazan exhibits a diarist’s ability to reconstruct believable conversations and a philosopher’s knack for getting underneath the surface of events. He characterizes this process as being innately human: “We cannot help but want to find common grounds with foreigners, to overcome human barriers, to manage cultural differences, and to conquer our fear of the unknown.” He intersperses his discussions of present-day realities in the places he visits with lively summaries of the locations’ histories, and the most effective sections deal with Romania. Although the book as a whole suffers from a lack of coherence, it counterbalances with dazzling scope and an infectious narrative zest. It bears out the truth of an ancient Greek writer, whom Kazan quotes: “Life is an enfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend.”
A lavish, often engaging personal account of the world, its peoples, and their local histories.Pub Date: April 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1495904806
Page Count: 463
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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