Written with an incandescence that would make a beacon proud, in prose turned and tempered by an interlude of 30 years...
Artist and critic Hill’s spry, fittingly outlandish account of his six months as a lighthouse keeper on three islands off the west coast of Scotland.
“Before I took the job I didn’t really think through what a lighthouse keeper actually did,” admits Hill, whose marvelous prose recalls Michael Caine’s flavorsome voiceover for The Man Who Would Be King. In 1973, Hill was a freshly minted art student, 19 years old, looking for something out of the way. “We will pay your return fare to Edinburgh,” came the eager reply to his inquiry about a lighthouse keepership, “and sure enough there was a tiny claim form, hand typed, attached with a small gold paperclip.” What came next were stints on three distant islands—and you would have to be a hard soul not to recognize the magic in Pladda, Ailsa Craig, and Hyskeir, where Hill learned the jack-of-all-trades life: how to wind a light like a grandfather clock; how to sleep in two-hour intervals, savoring that sleep as if it was a fine wine; how to cook (he would become intimately acquainted with haggis), for food is the lubricant that keeps the lights turning; how to practice the fine, unconventional art of living in close quarters with the other keepers, three or four to a house. Conversation with his peers was as nourishing as the meals, and Hill has come to think that mandatory lighthouse training “would be enough to re-invent society” in the pacifistic, organic sense he admires. Sadly, “as I write this there are no longer any manned lighthouses around the coast of Britain. . . . It’s a damn shame and it makes you want to cry.”
Written with an incandescence that would make a beacon proud, in prose turned and tempered by an interlude of 30 years between the act and the telling.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-84195-546-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
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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