A welcome second installment for readers who enjoyed Janzen’s first memoir. Others may want to turn elsewhere.
Continuing her search for spiritual relevance in everyday life, Janzen (Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, 2009) recounts the travails and joys encountered while finding love, embracing her new beau’s religion, and surviving breast cancer.
Newly single, the author stepped into the dating world and ended up with an unlikely Mr. Wonderful. A huge, goateed rocker with a permit to carry a concealed weapon, he was a reformed alcoholic with a light Southern accent who uttered pronouncements like, “Well, I’ll be double-dipped!” Janzen was mesmerized, she repeatedly informs the reader, by his giant pectorals and his Pentecostal church. “He loved the pastor, the people, the worship,” she writes. “He loved the teaching, the service programs, the bake sales. It was clear to me that this church was an expression of his core values. If I was to keep dating him, I would need to see what it was all about.” The author also covers a lot of other territory in her memoir—life as an English teacher; her breast cancer; the vast differences between Pentecostals and Mennonites, the religion she grew up with; her family relationships; her hot new romance; and her new relationship with God—and her peppy enthusiasm almost bounds off the page. Some readers, however, may grow tired of the author’s continuously emphatic tone or her constant attempts to appear slightly naughty by divulging topics good girls would not discuss. Also, she makes entirely too much use of the exclamation point—e.g., “If Lazarus was peacefully rotting there in the tomb and if at the sound of Jesus’s voice, he up and trotted out—well, miraculous! He left death and disease behind, yay! Stank hath no hold on him!”
A welcome second installment for readers who enjoyed Janzen’s first memoir. Others may want to turn elsewhere.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4555-0288-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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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