One of the weirder eyewitness accounts, but an invaluable record for literary scholars.
Papa’s late-life amanuensis, who after his death married his troubled youngest son, looks back more than 40 years to record frankly and without axes to grind the antics of a larger-than-life and truly bizarre clan.
Born Valerie Danby-Smith in 1940 in Dublin, the author interviewed Ernest Hemingway for the Irish Times in mid-1959 and was swiftly incorporated into the cuadrilla of hangers-on keeping him company that summer in Madrid. Valerie, fresh out of an Irish convent school, was eager to become a journalist; she was also cheerful, liked bullfights, and could drink heartily. Hemingway seems to have regarded her as the daughter he always hoped to have, not to mention a much-needed foil against his bossy fourth wife, Mary. Aged 60 and beginning to falter in health, Ernest relied increasingly on Valerie, hired her as his secretary, and lured her to his Cuban estate, Finca Vigía, where he was attempting to finish the manuscripts that became The Dangerous Summer and A Moveable Feast. The Cuban revolution eventually forced the Hemingways back to the US, despite Mary's calculated invitation of Castro to the finca (one of the author’s best descriptive passages), and Valerie saw them only intermittently after that. But those crucial months provided her with a glorious literary education and encounters many famous folks who later opened doors for her in New York, where she helped Mary sift through papers and manuscripts after Ernest committed suicide in 1961. The memoir grows almost surreal with Valerie’s marriage to Gregory. Vilified by Ernest for such early displays of unmanliness as stealing his mother’s hosiery, Greg finally confessed to his wife that he was a cross-dresser and later underwent a disastrous sex-change operation. (She calls their sex life “perfectly normal” and says he was a devoted father to their three children.) The author maintains throughout a remarkable, cold-eyed candor, though her portrait of filial friendship with Ernest is touching and humorous.
One of the weirder eyewitness accounts, but an invaluable record for literary scholars.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46733-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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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