“The secret of the universe is that we do have to take control of our own lives,” was, Dudgeon claims, Binchy’s lifelong...
An upbeat biography of the prolific, much-loved Irish writer.
Binchy (1940-2012) wrote about what she knew: love, friendship and community in small Irish towns like Dalkey, where she grew up in a conservative Catholic family. Dudgeon (Neverland: J.M. Barrie, the du Mauriers, and the Dark Side of Peter Pan, 2009, etc.) follows his subject’s hard-won striving to “discover, enhance, and believe” in her own worth. As a child, Binchy suffered from “a crippling self-consciousness” due to her weight; she responded by developing “a self-deprecating brand of humour” that served her well as an adult. As Dudgeon tells it, Binchy’s life was marked by a series of epiphanies. After a student exchange trip to France—her first time out of Ireland—she realized that her worldview was provincial and vowed to travel. At University College Dublin, from which she graduated with only a pass (the lowest rank possible), she discovered burgeoning feminism, beatniks and existentialism. Sartre became her “mentor and life guide.” On a train one day, she took her first drink of alcohol, which enhanced “her rapid-flow delivery of stories, anecdotes and observations on life.” She “rarely lost control” but developed a fondness for gin. Another epiphany occurred during a trip to Israel, where she worked on a kibbutz and took a side trip to Jerusalem to see where the Last Supper had taken place. What she found was a cave, a sight that shocked her so profoundly that she immediately relinquished her Catholic faith. Working as a teacher, Binchy became a writer by accident when her father submitted her travel letters to the Irish Independent. Later, she was offered a job as women’s editor of the Irish Times, for which she wrote for 32 years. Fiction came later, with immediate acclaim.
“The secret of the universe is that we do have to take control of our own lives,” was, Dudgeon claims, Binchy’s lifelong mantra, and he captures her ebullience and drive in this anecdotal biography.Pub Date: July 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-04714-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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