An endearing reminiscence that effectively relies on actual ideas considered over time rather than confessional feints.
Barbed yet charming memoir by the noted literary critic (The Truth About the Irish, 2000, etc.).
Growing up poor and Catholic in the rundown English city of Salford, he writes, “though you were a minority yourself, you were not brought up to prize the crankish or lovably idiosyncratic . . . or clamorously approve of him who stands alone.” Yet Eagleton maintained such an iconoclastic, inquisitive stance throughout his experiences with religious education, a stiflingly bad primary school, haughty Oxford, and ingrown leftist politics. His memoir is intriguingly organized into seven sections naming the intellectual and spiritual influences he encountered on his journey: “Lifers,” “Catholics,” “Thinkers,” “Politicos,” “Losers,” “Dons,” and “Aristos.” The “Lifers” were Carmelite nuns; ten-year-old Eagleton was their convent’s gatekeeper, the only lay male they encountered. This provided grounding for his skeptical adolescence, when he spent time in a grim seminary whose eccentric goings-on turned him toward more worldly pursuits. In “Thinkers,” he is unsentimental about his education: “I was a puny, livid-faced Oliver Twist among scabby-kneed roughs [who had] the sense of honor and blood-obligation of a Palermo pimp, and a range of experience as limited and repetitive as a fruitbat’s.” Despite this society’s animosity toward literary matters, Eagleton propelled himself into the scholarly life aided by Salford’s little-recognized cultural heritage and his own compulsive writing habits. His early academic successes allowed him to infiltrate the precincts of the moneyed and tenured classes, as well as the equally calcified Marxist left of the 1960s and ’70s; individuals in both groups receive humorous drubbings. Eagleton writes deftly, merging discussion of his simple beginnings and the passions that spurred him on through strife with genuine wit and a predilection for absurdist simile. Throughout, he remains attuned to prickly issues of class and achievement, laying bare the stratifications he witnessed in Anglo-Irish society.
An endearing reminiscence that effectively relies on actual ideas considered over time rather than confessional feints.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-29122-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
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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