Though 50 years have passed, all of which Price has spent teaching at Duke, his talent has not abated, and this “memoir of...
A memoir of young adulthood from the acclaimed American novelist (English/Duke Univ.; Letter to Godchild: Concerning Faith, 2005, etc.).
In 1955, the 22-year-old Price earned a Rhodes Scholarship and moved from his native North Carolina to Oxford, where he would become a writer. In his third autobiographical work, the author explores themes of belonging and identity amid the rich literary history of midcentury Britain. To a native Southerner—and a writer whose work has been almost entirely based in the South—the damp, dreary confines of Oxford were a stark transition, but one that was softened by the immediate and lasting friendships formed in those halls. It was an environment that proved robust in pleasure and opportunity and offered independence of spirit to a young man both grieving the death of his father and emerging as a sexual being. During these graduate years the author spent much time with such respected writers as Stephen Spender, David Cecil and W.H. Auden, all of whom left indelible intellectual impressions on the budding wordsmith as well as giving insight to the delicate humanity behind their lasting work—a parallel that extends to Price, whose debut novel, A Long and Happy Life, won the William Faulkner Award in 1962. Now in his mid 70s and bound to a wheelchair—the sad result of a malignant spinal tumor and subsequent surgeries—the author presents an unfettered collection of memories of his formative years and conveys that his Oxford experience provided the creative base from which he’d draw throughout his accomplished career.
Though 50 years have passed, all of which Price has spent teaching at Duke, his talent has not abated, and this “memoir of high adult happiness” brims with spirited, intimate and poetic language.Pub Date: May 12, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9189-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
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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