Lisicky built, and rebuilt and rebuilt, until it felt good to be in his skin. Famous Builder shows the same urge to grapple...
In an offbeat memoir, Lisicky (Lawnboy, not reviewed) takes dense, obsessed bites from his past and deposits them at the feet of his readers for them to marvel over how he got from there to here.
While growing up in southern New Jersey during the 1960s, in a world of sprawling housing developments, Lisicky wants to be a great builder, like Bill Levitt: “I want those who drive through my communities to be socked in the head with the sheer beauty of all they see.” (Later, when he meets Levitt—or is this just a piece of creative nonfiction?—he says to the mogul, “You gave style to the masses,” and the builder responds: “The masses are asses.”) He’s aware of the stress under Levitt’s veneer, but Lisicky hopes to imbue his work with elegance and understated good taste. He: “All developers do is rip people off. I’m going to be a musician and a composer.” And he does, changing over from construction to liturgical composition, not that the housing developments haven’t left their mark. Through his teens and early 20s, he writes church music—his work is even published—and he discovers a gay sexuality. The sexuality survives, but not the future in music: it had felt right when the church was as much about hope as fear; but now, in its conservative Dark Ages, he asks how he could “ignore charges of colluding with the enemy” should he return to liturgical composition. There are riffs on neighbors, clothing, and college, each snapping the reader to attention after having been lost in one of Lisicky’s long, atmospheric tableaux of family—where the warmth of the reflections and steady pulse of humor suggest Lisicky wasn’t an unhappy boy, nor an unobservant one.
Lisicky built, and rebuilt and rebuilt, until it felt good to be in his skin. Famous Builder shows the same urge to grapple and illuminate.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-55597-369-8
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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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