Slick, self-analytical memoirs of a young man who, at considerable pain to his adoptive parents, is driven to find the mother who gave him up at birth. Although Green says that until he was 21 he never thought about his birth mother, he describes himself as a man whose rejection at birth not only shaped his unsavory relations with women but drove him to become a high achiever—class covaledictorian, first-round draft choice of the Atlanta Falcons, published author (The Dark Side of the Game, 1996, etc.), lawyer, and television sportscaster. Epiphany came when he learned that his girlfriend's mother, to whom he was especially close, had once given up a child for adoption. For the next seven years he tried to locate his own mother, and through a combination of persistence, luck, a willingness to trade on his reputation as a football star, and a readiness to ask favors, he finally succeeded. Despite his subject matter, Green's writing packs little emotional punch, and scenes that ought to pull heartstrings fall flat. While achievement and respectability are high priorities for Green, such is apparently not the case with his younger adopted brother, whose erratic job history and disturbing behavior serve as a kind of counterpoint to the author's own success. Green's story thus contains a double warning for adoptive parents: If nature wins out over nurture, you might find yourself raising a loser who will disappoint you; on the other hand, you might raise a winner whose single-minded pursuit of his roots will hurt you. Happily, Green's late grasp of what parenting is all about leads to the beginnings of a reconciliation with his adoptive parents. A book that has the elements of an engaging human drama but, clogged as it is with amateur psychologizing, fails to stir. ($50,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-06-039217-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
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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