A piercing, heartbreaking reminder that “loss doesn’t end.”
Poignant account of a young woman’s struggle to accept a parent’s dying.
Describing the hardship of watching her mother Jackie slowly succumb to breast cancer after a nine-year battle, Romm (The Mother Garden, 2007) immediately makes it clear which side she’s on: life, at any cost. Throughout this brutally honest account of Jackie’s final three weeks, she derides the hospice and its workers who “build the boat of morphine and pillows” to death. By contrast, she clung to every shred of possibility, every technique or piece of furniture that could prolong her mother’s life and give Romm back the strong woman who raised her. Into her chronicle of these last weeks, the author weaves details of her own life, which was tinged with cancer’s long, erosive mark; her mother was diagnosed when she was just 19. Romm examines her childhood, work and relationships, at times using their reactions to Jackie’s illness as a barometer, at times allowing the cancer to influence her perspective. The author and her father, both tense with grief, weren’t always in agreement as they grappled with the impossible task of doing what’s best for a loved one in pain without sacrificing a single moment of connection. At times, the only bright spot for the author was her new puppy, a bystander to the heartache with an irrepressible joy for life. Romm bemoans the world’s inability to guide us during a time of loss. “Much gets said about healing, but what of the violence of the actual event?” she writes. None of the hospice’s CDs or pamphlets, she found, offered anything but clichés. In response, the final chapter includes 12 blank pages meant to represent one woman’s ordeal as unique and yet collective.
A piercing, heartbreaking reminder that “loss doesn’t end.”Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6788-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
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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