A fawning volume that focuses on the first 50 years of the celebrated writer, aviator (Lindbergh was the first woman to qualify as a glider pilot), and wife of the Lone Eagle, Charles A. Lindbergh. Hertog, a freelance journalist and photographer, acknowledges early on that she is star-struck, revealing that the woman she calls “Annie” was “my mentor and my friend”—even before they’d met. After a chance encounter with Lindbergh in an airport in 1985, Hertog “pursued” her, eventually interviewing her ten times during the ten years she devoted to the biography. The book, Hertog’s first, begins in 1927. Charles has returned to North America from his solo flight across the Atlantic and is the world’s first mega-celebrity; Anne is a daughter of privilege (her father is Ambassador to Mexico). The two eventually meet, quickly marry, and spend much of their subsequent lives flying all over the world and dodging a predacious press corps. Hertog covers in some detail the two most controversial periods of the Lindberghs’ lives—the 1932 kidnaping and murder of their son and the deep admiration that both Lindberghs felt for Nazi Germany in the pre-WWII years. (Charles was an early and enthusiastic proponent of eugenics.) In prose often precious, Hertog strives mightily to portray Anne as a gifted woman caught in the amber of convention, but another Anne emerges instead—a woman of wealth and leisure, an arrogant, deeply self-centered woman, racist and anti-Semitic (like her husband), whose treacly little books, packed with truisms, enjoyed lengthy stays on best-seller lists. In 1957, poet and critic John Ciardi was the first to declare Empress Anne wore no clothes, but Hertog dismisses him as a “womanizer” who suffered from “spiritual turmoil.— (By contrast, Anne’s sexual infidelity brought her “consolation.—) Although Herzog claims to have lifted Lindbergh’s “mask,— she reveals little, and instead paints on her subject yet another false, flattering face. (84 b&w photos, some not seen) (Book-of-the-Month Club selection; author tour)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-46973-X
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
