Saving face, face value, and putting on a brave face will all resonate differently with readers of this quirky,...
Three titles inaugurate a new series of short paperbacks offering meditations on the author’s face.
The series was inspired by a passage from Jorge Luis Borges, whose parable finds a man establishing his own world “with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.” These three book-length essays examine the face as bloodline and lineage, as a mask as permeable as identity. Each is a memoir of sorts, though more of a metaphysical illumination in the case of Ozeki (A Tale for the Time-Being, 2013, etc.), a novelist who is also ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest. Hers, titled A Time Code, is the first and longest and is structured as a three-hour meditation of the author looking in the mirror and recording the ruminations that her reflection conjures. Connecting with the inspiration of Borges, she begins with the Zen koan, “What did your face look like before your parents were born?” Her face reflects her parentage, as the daughter of an American professor and the Japanese woman with whom he fell in love so shortly after the nations had been enemies. Ozeki remembers her face in girlhood and now contemplates it on the cusp of 60, concluding, “my face is and isn’t me. It’s a nice face. It has lots of people in it.” In Cartography of the Void, Abani (The Secret History of Las Vegas, 2014, etc.) also comes to terms with his mixed parentage—white mother and West African father—as he attempts to resolve his ambivalence toward the latter, whose face is now his. With Strangers on a Pier, Aw offers the most straightforward account—and the one least focused on “the face”—of the immigrant family’s experience as their son was raised in “a traditional Chinese family” before he moved to Britain for an education that launched a literary career (Five Star Billionaire, 2013, etc.).
Saving face, face value, and putting on a brave face will all resonate differently with readers of this quirky, philosophical series.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63206-052-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Restless Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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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