A painful purging of demons that is more cathartic for the author than readers.
A sometimes plodding, sometimes inspired chronicle of a daughter’s transient childhood.
Helwig begins and ends her meandering memoir at her mother Carola’s gravesite, a place where redemption and closure temper jagged memories of years spent shouldering the burden of caretaking her five younger sisters while her truant mother succumbed to mental illness. A “raven-haired, hazel-eyed beauty,” Carola became a child bride in 1948 at 14 in sleepy Glenwood, Iowa, giving birth to the author a year into her marriage while making ends meet writing jingles for grooming products. At 16, Carola suffered a nervous breakdown trying to juggle two daughters, farm life and marriage, so she divorced her husband and moved the family to Colorado to stay at her mother’s house. It wasn’t long before Davy, an oil driller, fell in love with and swiftly married her, bringing about third daughter Patricia. Helwig nimbly conveys her confusion when, at age 6, Carola inexplicably dumped her and sister Vicki off at their biological father’s country home back in Iowa for the summer. Those “idyllic” months on the farm would turn into years before Carola returned, ushering them through an endless succession of cities, schools, the birth of two more girls and the adoption of cousin Nancy. As Helwig chronicles her unorthodox upbringing, her narrative suffers from a surfeit of detail and exposition that alternately decorates yet dilutes her cheerless childhood. Still, in growing up devoid of traditional parental affection and support, the author’s depiction of her life and her mother’s downward spiral toward parental fatigue is frank, and this sincerity refreshes the frequently rambling prose. Bearing the increasingly physical punishments and continually caretaking for her younger sisters while Carola drank at local bars, Helwig sadly reminisces on becoming “swallowed up by the grown-up world.” However, “for a few precious moments,” she reflects, “we actually felt like a normal family.”
A painful purging of demons that is more cathartic for the author than readers.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2847-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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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