Despite some repetition, deft pacing and vivid portraits result in an absorbing mystery and a forthright memoir of abiding...
In an accomplished debut memoir, a daughter struggles to understand the life of her mother, who was murdered when the author was 12.
An only child, Perry became a problem for her relatives: her unstable grandmother, aunts who lived near and far, and a father who had left her mother years before and willingly gave up parental rights. In the immediate aftermath of the murder, Perry was questioned relentlessly by the police, who intimated that she was somehow complicit in the murder: she must have seen something, or she must have known the killer whom she was protecting. She was haunted by the murder and fearful that the killer would return to murder her, too. Shuttled between relatives in Maine, she finally ended up in Texas, where her mother’s sister Tootsie was stationed with the Army. When Tootsie suddenly and harshly sent her back to Maine, she was taken in by her former babysitter, who claimed to have been her mother’s best friend, a woman incapable of understanding Perry’s emotional state. “My sadness was overwhelmed by fear and visceral disgust and rage,” writes the author, “rage so consuming and aimless that sometimes I was afraid of myself.” At one point, she considered suicide; instead, she deliberately tamped down her feelings. An unsympathetic psychologist concluded that her “effort at control” was “sinister,” indicating that she was somehow involved in her mother’s death. The killer—a man her mother may have known—was apprehended and convicted 12 years after the crime, but the information disclosed during the trial only made her mother more mysterious to Perry. Two TV dramas later documented the case, but the author felt the story was unfinished, inspiring her quest to understand her mother’s life, the series of volatile men she lived with, her community’s culture of violence, and her family’s deep wounds.
Despite some repetition, deft pacing and vivid portraits result in an absorbing mystery and a forthright memoir of abiding grief.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-544-30265-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
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