A trenchant and witty book on maturity and “middle-age shock.”
A bestselling American author and journalist living in Paris investigates the “undeniably transitional” decade of the 40s.
As she neared the end of her 30s, Druckerman (Bébé Day by Day: 100 Keys to French Parenting, 2013, etc.) suddenly noticed how people—and especially Parisian waiters—addressed her using the matronly “madame” rather than the more youthful “mademoiselle.” To understand the “new rules” of maturity, the author began to assess every aspect of her life. The marriage and more stable life Druckerman acquired by her mid-30s brought with them a need to remove the dysfunctional friendships that she collected with ease in her youth. The French-born children she had with her British husband made her feel like the “ruler of a tiny country” always subject to judgment by her opinionated “subjects.” Middle age also gave new impetus to last-fling experiments—e.g., the ménage-à-trois she planned for her husband’s 40th birthday—and the author offers extended ruminations on wrinkles, arm cellulite, and the fashion faux pas of older women. When a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (for which Druckerman was successfully treated) put her face to face with her mortality, she was unexpectedly overcome with new gratitude for being alive. Research into middle age revealed that the so-called midlife crisis was actually “a cultural construct,” but one that nevertheless continued to offer those seeking answers—like the author—a narrative for how “life [was] supposed to go.” In the end, French culture offered her the most satisfying answer: that aging was a matter of learning how to feel comfortable in one’s skin and “live out the best version of [one’s] age.” Half memoir and half ironic how-to guide, Druckerman’s book is not only a humorous meditation on the gains and pains of a time in life “when you become who you are”; it is also a thought-provoking meditation on “what it means to be a grown-up.”
A trenchant and witty book on maturity and “middle-age shock.”Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59420-637-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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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