An imaginative spiritual autobiography, by novelist and biographer Clark (James Beard, 1993; Mr. White’s Confession, 1998; etc.). As someone who “has been variously, and sometimes simultaneously, a Catholic, a Protestant, a Puritan, a Transcendentalist, an agnostic, and an atheist,” Clark has an interesting personal history. Moreover, the book is a true “genealogy” in the sense that Clark traces many of these diverse religious manifestations through five centuries of his own family history of Griggses, Homers, and Clarkes [sic]. As Clark himself has cycled back between Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism, so too did his ancestors, one of whom served on Henry VIII’s Privy Council during the pivotal English Reformation. In the 17th century, Clark’s now-Protestant family established roots in New England, where another ancestor, a doctor in Salem Village in the 1690s, was the first to be called when two young local girls began having fits, and saw his own servant girl gain notoriety as an accuser. Nineteenth-century ancestors dabbled in Transcendentalism (one was Emerson’s cousin), as Clark himself did “five years too late” while in California in the early 1970s (he missed the heyday of communes but arrived in San Francisco in time for the obligatory religious and sexual exploration). He found that his “grab bag” of eclectic spiritual practices didn—t ultimately satisfy him. Though in the early ’90s he considered himself a latter-day Puritan (“not for nothing did nineties poseurs like me so often dress in black”), a long search has recently led him back to the Catholic Church of his Tudor ancestors, bringing five centuries of history full circle. Creative in its connections of genealogy and personal history.
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-20932-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
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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