Adam’s life has many intriguing elements, but her experiences are too often flat and formless on the page.
Adam (Marrying Santiago, 2015) looks back on an accidental life in Chile from the perspective of nearly 50 years.
The author, a California native, traces her life journey, beginning with her 1972 move to Chile and marriage. The narrative is less a memoir than a collection of blog post–like anecdotes—a mixed blessing. Adam moves from moment to moment, subject to subject in a series of serendipitous slices of life, but readers will be left looking for a set of throughlines to help the vignettes add up. The author is an adequate writer—“away from city noises,” she observes in one short essay, “I notice the sounds of the wind: soughing through pine branches, howling around the eaves of the house, whistling through electric wires”—and there is a kind of tactile immediacy to the language, a physicality to the scenes. Unfortunately, as the book progresses, there is less to compel us. For all Adam promises to tell us about Chile, her life is not so different from those of upper-middle-class people everywhere. She writes, for instance, about the decision to let her hair grow gray or the way that playing with her grandchildren allows her to feel young. All of this material is fair game, but it is hardly unique. If a writer is going to take on daily life in an engrossing way, there must be something in her expression to illuminate the experience, to get beneath the surface and light it from within. Instead, Adam offers lists or commonplaces—e.g., what she bought at the market, what she said to the gardener—without any particular nuance or insight. Even late in the book, when she chronicles her return to Colombia, where she was in the Peace Corps, the stakes feel inessential and underexplored.
Adam’s life has many intriguing elements, but her experiences are too often flat and formless on the page.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-415-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 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
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.
