Reflective and tender writing on finding new meanings and a different life after heartbreaking loss.
A memoir of finding a new way forward following significant misfortune.
In The Hot Young Widow’s Club (2019), her recent TED book, McInerny (It’s Okay to Laugh: (Crying Is Cool Too), 2017, etc.) told the story of her life after she suffered three tragedies in one year: a miscarriage and the deaths of her father and her husband, Aaron. Her latest book is a continuation of sorts, chronicling her relationship with Aaron and her new relationship with Matthew, a divorced man with two children. With both witty humor and profundity, the author addresses the harsh reality of death and the life-changing effects of her grief, especially that critical first year when every day was an anniversary of some sort that needed to be lived through as best she could. Her story is also a celebration of life, sexual desire, and learning to love what is right in front of you, regardless of how others feel or react to the situation. The author, who hosts the podcast Terrible, Thanks for Asking, openly shares her fears about potentially losing Aaron’s extended family as members of her own, the difficulties and triumphs of blending Matthew’s family with hers, and the gratefulness she has felt about having two different relationships with two extraordinary men. Additionally, within this tragic love story are minor themes of feminism, sexism, and religion. McInerny’s best friends and their unwavering support through all the ups and downs are also significant factors in this perceptive tale. The author’s love for both Aaron and Matthew is consistently apparent but, refreshingly, never maudlin. McInerny delivers a highly emotional—but not overly somber—story that will appeal to anyone who has suffered a significant loss and is seeking a path toward life’s next chapter.
Reflective and tender writing on finding new meanings and a different life after heartbreaking loss.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-279240-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
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
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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