Internationally acclaimed for her contribution to world peace, Alva Myrdal's personal life (1902-1986) was a series of battles—against her rural Swedish parents, her husband, her children, her reputation, and in her personal quest to find out ``How do I become myself?'' Such ironies abound in this tactful and poignant memoir by her daughter (Philosophy/Brandeis; A Strategy for Peace, 1989, etc.). ``Serving'' her demanding, egocentric, and volatile husband, Gunnar (her ``consort battleship,'' as she called him), who won the Nobel prize in Economics, Alva often left their three children for long periods of time with various surrogates, damaging them but mostly damaging her relationship with them. Still, she longed for the children she could not care for, designed a family home that isolated the parents, taught educational theory she did not follow. Her children—disheveled, neglected, drifting—parented themselves. Jan, the son, a talented writer, ultimately rejected his parents, publishing a scathing attack on his mother just as she was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982. Of the daughters, Kaj chose to live with a teacher on a farm, and Sissela, while her mother was in America lecturing on the status of women, was so insecure that she said she had to be seen by someone to know she was alive. And Alva's celebrated marriage itself declined into a quarrelsome intellectual companionship. Rational, unsentimental, the parents kept account books of all the money they ever spent on their children, sums they decided justified disinheriting them in favor of a ``universal heir,'' the abstract causes they had dedicated their lives to, a legacy that left the children begging from strangers for family mementos. Gunnar claimed that their social science was ``concerned with explaining why all these potentially and intentionally good people so often make life a hell for themselves and each other when they live together.'' This probing and forgiving book carries on the explanation, exploring those ironic connections and disconnections between the public and private lives that Alva, in searching for herself, could not see.
Pub Date: June 6, 1991
ISBN: 0-201-57086-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1991
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
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