In a book filled with wit, candor, and poignancy, the author concludes, “late-life love may heat at a lower temperature, but...
A deeply personal and bittersweet paean to love “immune to the vicissitude of time.”
Feminist scholar Gubar’s (Emeritus, English/Indiana Univ.; Reading and Writing Cancer: How Words Heal, 2016, etc.) memoir could be read as the third in a trilogy of books she’s recently written exploring her fight against cancer and the roles art and love play in the battle. Her husband, Don, 17 years older than she and suffering from injuries and age-related problems, figured in earlier books, but he’s front and center here. Complicating their time together was the difficult decision to leave their large house, Inverness, for an apartment. She borrows a term from Joyce Carol Oates, “bibliomemoir,” to describe her quest to find “honest portraits” from fiction, poems, plays, and films that deal with the “tensions, tussles, and triumphs of my own later-life love affair.” Gubar “integrate[s] literary interpretation with personal reflection” to fashion a “resounding retort to overwhelmingly negative valuations of aging.” She sets off “searching for trail markings on an uncleared path” with Jenny Diski’s “comedy of bad manners,” Happily Ever After, and then discovers Helen Simonson’s “sparkling” novel about loss, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, which drew her into a “world unlike my own.” Gubar also discusses Samuel Beckett’s “unexpectedly funny” play Happy Days, a “geriatric farce intriguing in its portrayal of a later-life love affair like no other.” Gabriel García Márquez’s “sprawling” Love in the Time of Cholera hits the “grand slam of late-life love tradition” with its portrait of love as “both a sickness and an anodyne.” Offering particular support were poet and translator Jane Kenyon, Donald Hall’s poems about his ill wife, and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Lila, which cost Gubar “half a box of tissues.”
In a book filled with wit, candor, and poignancy, the author concludes, “late-life love may heat at a lower temperature, but it bubbles and rises.”Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-60957-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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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