Pretty pictures and map sketches help make this a dreamy, empowering retirement fantasy.
Psychologist and former actress Stephenson (Billy, 2002, etc.) leaves her glamorous L.A. life for a literary sail in the South Seas.
The author was ready for adventure after 20 years of pursuing a career and taking care of her children. She had been reading about Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson’s late-19th-century voyages among the South Seas islands in search of a salubrious climate for Robert’s ailing health. He suffered from tuberculosis and had been a semi-invalid most of his life. A divorcée 11 years her husband’s senior, Fanny was unflaggingly resourceful, and her spirit of adventure inspired Stephenson to make her own mid-life voyage. She procured a 112-foot Florida sloop, renamed it Takapuna after her New Zealand birthplace and refitted it with all the modern trimmings. She took a crash course in sailing, though she also took the precaution of hiring a professional captain and crew, and learned to handle guns in case of attack by pirates. (Yes, they still exist, though now they’re “entirely unromantic scoundrels with balaclavas in lieu of eyepatches.”) And off she went, with transient family members and friends on board, just as hurricane season was getting underway. From Florida they sailed around Cuba to Panama, the Galápagos and on to the various clusters of South Seas islands from the Marquesas to the Marshalls. The trip logged 19,000 nautical miles in nine months, tracking the Stevensons’ long-ago, pioneering extended stays among the Samoans and other tribes they warmly befriended. Accompanying Stephenson’s cheery chronicle are excerpts from diaries and letters chronicling her predecessors’ trip. “In some of these islands . . . it was, a little while ago, a dangerous possession to own a good set of teeth, as many people were murdered for them,” writes Fanny in one of the many nifty passages illuminating the area’s archaeology and history. The literary connection is tenuous, but Stephenson’s you-go-girl tone is earnest and endearing.
Pretty pictures and map sketches help make this a dreamy, empowering retirement fantasy.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7553-1285-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Headline
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
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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