Well-crafted and intelligent sketches of particular interest to students of nonfiction writing, who’ll find a useful model...
Cinematically inclined English novelist Faulks (Charlotte Gray, 1999, etc.) mourns the beautiful, talented sons of Albion, doomed to early graves.
The youthful accomplishments of the three men depicted here promised renown, for better or worse, but they died prematurely. Faulks doesn’t have much of a thesis, apart from the belief that “young or short lives are more sensitive indicators of the pressure of public attitudes than lives lived long and crowned with honours,” a nice enough point that goes unbuttressed. Still, his brief biographies are marvels of economy and good writing, reason enough to read them. His first subject, Christopher Wood (1902–30), was the toast of beau-monde Paris, a first-class painter who haunted the smart cafes and was on a first-name basis with Diaghilev and Picasso. Gifted though he was, Wood never quite got over the shock of childhood polio (“he was shamefully removed from the world of other children, and was in continual pain”) and killed himself before he could fulfill his gifts. Unluckier still was Faulks’s second subject, RAF pilot Richard Hillary (1919–43), handsome and confident until badly burned in a plane crash during the Battle of Britain; he survived but was severely disfigured and died three years later during a training-flight accident. Fans of John le Carré will be most drawn to the final portrait, of tortured Jeremy Wolfenden (1934–65), hailed as the most brilliant Englishman of his generation and beloved of Oxford University’s female students, for whom “his acknowledged but still illegal homosexuality added to his mysterious glamour.” Wolfenden ended his days playing, and being played by, spies and counterspies of the English, American, and Soviet intelligence services, all of whom found use for the easily tempted and blackmailed young man, who drank himself to death by age 31.
Well-crafted and intelligent sketches of particular interest to students of nonfiction writing, who’ll find a useful model here.Pub Date: May 12, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-72744-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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