A touching rapprochement between mother and daughter, but much of the writing is murky and both narratives sound curiously...
The New Age odyssey of bestselling author Kidd (The Mermaid Chair, 2005, etc.) and her daughter Ann.
In alternating chapters, the mother-daughter team recounts their different but parallel journeys of self-discovery. Mom found guidance in the regenerative myths of Demeter, Persephone and the Virgin Mary, while Ann, feeling confused and rudderless in her early 20s, wondered whether the power of Athena could help her unearth life’s purpose. Sue, who grew up in upstate South Carolina and worked as a nurse during her early adult life, eventually found her writer’s voice and moved with her husband to Charleston. Ann attended Columbia College (in South Carolina) and resolved to study Greek history after an inspiring group trip to Greece in the late ’90s, but she was rejected from her ideal graduate program. During a subsequent trip to Greece to commemorate Sue’s 50th birthday and Ann’s college graduation, Ann felt depressed about her future just as Sue was hoping to find spiritual clues to the next phase of her life. Most of the book is devoted to their first trip to Greece in 1998, narrated first by Sue, then Ann, from Athens to Eleusis (the sanctuary of Demeter) to Ephesus, Turkey, where “Mary’s House” is located. Both mother and daughter continually sound the themes of autonomy and self-realization. Yet while Sue hit on her life’s mission to write a novel—which became the mega-selling The Secret Life of Bees (2002)—Ann returned home, got married and had a baby. Although she did find courage to apprentice as a writer, the letdown is palpable.
A touching rapprochement between mother and daughter, but much of the writing is murky and both narratives sound curiously alike—won’t deter the many fans of Mom, however.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02120-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2009
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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