A golden bowl, brimming full.
Stunning multigenerational portrait of one of the most complex families in American intellectual history.
It’s difficult to nudge aside brothers Henry (the novelist) and William (psychologist, philosopher, spiritual seeker) to accommodate lesser-known sister Alice and ne’er-do-well younger brothers Bob and Wilkie—not to mention parents Henry and Mary, Aunt Kate and such notable friends and acquaintances as Emerson, Thackeray, Wharton et al. But first-time author Fisher accomplishes the task with aplomb and panache. The book begins in 1855, as the peripatetic paterfamilias prepared to haul the entire entourage off to Europe. (Henry Sr. wanted his boys in Swiss schools, a hot desire that quickly cooled in the alpine air.) The author then retreats for 100 pages or so to sketch the family background before returning to the 1855 European sojourn. The complex demands of a multiple biography buttressed by the requisite social, cultural and literary history sometimes lead Fisher, as he shifts focus from one James to another, to rewind his tape to catch up on the doings of a James he’s neglected for a while. But he is careful with dates and places, so the potential for confusion is unrealized. Back and forth across the Atlantic we go, with Henry fils spending most of his career abroad, Alice settling in England eight years before her death and the rest of the clan making frequent visits. Henry Sr. is portrayed as a dominant, fiery intellectual presence, and the author properly accentuates Mary’s quiet strength. Alice, sickly and often depressed, struggled to establish her identity amid dominant men. Civil War veterans Bob and Wilkie moved West but failed to find either fame or fortune. William and Henry became cultural icons. Although Fisher discusses the Jameses’ publications and other enterprises, his focus is on them as a family, a collection of unique individuals who remained affectionate while envious, loyal and supportive even when continents and oceans separated them.
A golden bowl, brimming full.Pub Date: June 10, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8050-7490-1
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
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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