Far from generating epiphanies, these “renovations” merely reinforce how nice it is to be an adult.
A 48-year-old writer chronicles his goofball quest to correct the perceived failures of his youth.
Hemley (Nonfiction Writing/Univ. of Iowa; Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday, 2003, etc.) undertakes a dubious immersion-journalism project in the form of “do-overs.” These attempts to repair the major emotional traumas of his childhood and adolescence involve revisiting the sites of his worst failures, from kindergarten to high school, summer camp to standardized testing. He couldn’t even scrounge up a prom date. But you’d think his privileged adult existence—published author, father of three, university professor—might snuff out memories of botched grade-school plays and junior-high bullies. Hemley, however, insists that he’s still bothered by these trivialities. Too bad, then, that the book’s conceptual gimmickry yields little more than the occasional entertaining anecdote, the obvious fish-out-of-water comedy inherent in someone pushing 50 trying to pass for a five-year-old, and a fitfully amusing travelogue, as the author lumbers from Sewanee, Tenn., to Osaka, Japan, trying to enlist unfortunate souls from his past in his geeky time-travel fantasies. Of course, Hemley’s had real traumas that hang like a mist over this revisionist endeavor: an ugly divorce, his late sister Nola’s schizophrenia and his father’s death at 51. A few relevant observations cut through the “gee, they sure did things differently in my day!” remarks, as when Hemley contrasts contemporary kids’ structured, monitored and medicated lives with the dog-eat-dog anarchism that characterized his own youthful social experiences. But the do-over with the most potential for dramatic tension—going to the senior prom with his high-school crush—falls flat.
Far from generating epiphanies, these “renovations” merely reinforce how nice it is to be an adult.Pub Date: May 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-316-02060-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 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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