A long, unblinking look in time’s mirror, by a writer who has spent his life mastering his subject and his craft.
A sometimes poignant, sometimes nasty, often amusing and always erudite memoir by the historian and art critic (Goya, 2003, etc.).
Hughes begins his account with near-death (a 1999 car crash in Australia), ends with the beginnings of his professional life in 1970 (aboard a plane from Rome to New York City, where he will begin his long tenure as art critic for Time magazine). In between are stories about his family (the Hugheses had some prominence Down Under; his father was a heroic pilot in WWI), about his fierce Roman Catholic schooling (it didn’t take), the genesis of his love of art, his decision to leave Australia, his loves and losses and failed marriage, his European travels, his gradual emergence as a writer, his relationships with artists and publishers and the BBC (for whom he freelanced). At times, Hughes is gleefully self-deprecating, no more so than during his protracted tragi-comic account of his marriage to a woman who, throughout their relationship, apparently slept with just about every weirdo in London (and elsewhere) in the ’60s, including Jimi Hendrix, whose contribution to Hughes family harmony was a case of the clap. “I was a cuckold going cuckoo,” he laments. The author also skewers and grills a number of folks and phenomena and fashions—from Tiny Tim to Irwin Shaw (who once stole Hughes’s girlfriend) to Easy Rider to what he views as the entire anti-intellectual, superficial, hyper-religious, ultra-phony, trashy, celebrity-besotted American culture of today. Some highlights: the merry mortars he launches against the Australian press, his stories about Catholic boarding school, his account of Florence’s disastrous 1966 flood, his flops as a writer (he couldn’t finish a book on da Vinci), his swift report about his courtship by Time. (An error: Polonius is addressing Laertes, not Hamlet, when he says “to thine own self be true.”)
A long, unblinking look in time’s mirror, by a writer who has spent his life mastering his subject and his craft.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-4444-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
