For those who consider life’s lessons best expressed in padded greeting cards and “the Gospel According to Elbert Hubbard.”
Another journeyman writer details the teaching and inspiration he received at the feet of a wise and kindly mentor. Move over, Morrie and Father Joe.
This time, the dispenser of sympathetic understanding is the operator of his very own eponymous TV neighborhood: the late Fred Rogers (1928–2003), whose testament is herein reverentially reported. Disciple Madigan (The Burning, 2001, etc.) is, as he reminds us a few times, a prizewinning journalist. His book takes its title from the words with which Mr. Rogers usually signed off his letters to Madigan after a missive early in their relationship in which the troubled younger man asked for this reassurance. The author is a soulful, pious man who survived marital difficulties and the death of a brother with the guidance and friendship of Rogers, who was undeniably a kindly, good man. Madigan certainly makes sure we appreciate that fundamental fact. “Because of the pitch-perfect love of his letters,” he writes in a not-untypical passage, “it sometimes seemed . . . that I was corresponding with God himself. (My wife would come to believe that Fred was actually Jesus, reincarnate.)” But Rogers was by all reports an intelligent and complex man, with more to him than the “celestial font of affirmation” we find here. He deserves better than a paean larded with snippets of correspondence, extracts from Madigan’s newspaper pieces and a general endorsement of love, family, friendship, religion and the thoughts of the Little Prince. It may be therapy for the author, but it does no particular service to Mr. Rogers.
For those who consider life’s lessons best expressed in padded greeting cards and “the Gospel According to Elbert Hubbard.”Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2006
ISBN: 1-592-40227-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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.
