Gregorian made an important life for himself the old-fashioned way, by earning every little bit of it.
The restless Gregorian—presidencies at the New York Public Library, Brown University, the Carnegie Corporation—offers a memoir that expertly blends poetry, pedantry, progressivism, and unruly university politics.
By his fourth sentence, Gregorian is already engaged in a scholarly discourse on the identity of biblical rivers—and so the book continues, with Gregorian always happy to drop in a few lines of Robert Frost, say, or to explain how The Sorrows of Young Werther captures his feelings after a love affair falls apart. For Gregorian is all about brains—big brains, using them nimbly, honestly, compassionately—starting with his grandmother’s teachings when he was a poor youth in Tabriz, Iran, right through to his present post at the Carnegie Corporation. Getting there wasn’t easy, and what a story it makes: leaving Iran, alone and destitute, to study in Beirut; gaining entrance to Stanford; and teaching at San Francisco State in the mid- to late-1960s (where he was faculty advisor to the Progressive Labor Party: Gregorian is equally at ease talking about the vagaries of the history of the Caucasus or about the split in SDS). The author bounces from the University of Texas to Penn, keeping one hand busy with his teaching while dipping the other into the mire of university politics. He is brilliant in delineating the backstabbing, pettiness, and obfuscations he contended with in order to raise the level of educational quality when he was dean at various schools. He has a light touch, knowing when to coax the reader gently through an intricate piece of philanthropic politics, and when to let rip: “I was not a Mr. Magoo. If somebody spits at me, I cannot pretend it is a raindrop.” His stint at the NYPL and now at Carnegie allows him to fuse learning with philanthropy—but his loss from academia is a great one.
Gregorian made an important life for himself the old-fashioned way, by earning every little bit of it.Pub Date: June 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-684-80834-X
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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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