Like the Winns, one feels “salted” by the experience, however vicariously, drawn to the edge in defiance of fate and in...
Debut author Winn narrates a moving memoir of identities lost and found along England’s wind-swept South West Coast Path.
Having lost their farm and livelihood through a judicial misstep, and with her husband, Moth, diagnosed with a terminal illness only days before, a comfortable existence was cruelly whisked away. With few options and even less money, the couple determined to walk and camp the entire 630-mile stretch of the path, from Minehead in the north through Poole on the English Channel, not knowing how far a pair of 50-somethings not in the best of shape might reach. Many people’s uncharitable reactions to their homeless state—one would think they were lepers—did not help matters, though those attitudes were often balanced by unexpected gestures of generosity. Along the way, their strength faltered and was regained. The unbearable became bearable, and despair gave way to resolve. The path became home and, more, a godsend. “Life is now,” writes the author, “this minute. It's all we have. It's all we need.” The saga opens with a tinge of melodrama (understandably), and Winn displays a mercurial prose style that takes a while to settle down and achieve simplicity and clarity of observation. The author’s descriptive passages show a keen appreciation for coastal ecologies and the enchantment of moments in the wild. If some vignettes strain credulity, readers will quickly forget as they come to genuinely admire the couple’s fortitude and resiliency. The book is not without humor or healthy portions of irony and self-doubt. Throughout, readers are immersed in a grueling and transformative adventure.
Like the Winns, one feels “salted” by the experience, however vicariously, drawn to the edge in defiance of fate and in search of a new life. They found it as well as a measure of acceptance, and their story is indelibly told.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-14-313411-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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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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