A valuable historical record and a strangely stylish, hypnotic literary work.
The acclaimed director’s diary of his time making Fitzcarraldo (1982).
From the beginning, the film faced more challenges and uncertainties than most of Herzog’s other movies, and he composed a lengthy list that ended with the grim forecast that it could “be added to indefinitely.” Filming had to start anew after Jason Robards, the original lead and an actor Herzog came to scorn, abandoned the project halfway through due to illness, and Mick Jagger, set to play the lead character’s assistant, had to drop out to go on tour. When filming restarted, it was with German actor Klaus Kinski, a raving, unhinged presence in these journals—his volatility so alarmed the locals that they quietly asked the director if he wanted Kinski killed. Then there were the nightmarish logistics of the famous scene where a steamship is dragged over a small hill in the jungle, from one river to another. Herzog insisted that, as the central metaphor of the film, the event must be recorded without any compromise. (Much of the behind-the-scenes drama is recorded in Les Blank’s documentary Burden of Dreams.) Herzog’s journals effectively map the director’s dislocation and loneliness, but they also highlight his unique imagination and the profound effect the remote Peruvian location had on him. The writing is haunted by what Herzog came to see as the misery of the jungle, a place where “all the proportions are off.” He slept fitfully, when at all, and there is a hallucinatory quality to the journals—the line between what is real and what is imagined becomes nearly invisible. Recorded daily, with occasional gaps and fragments, Herzog’s reflections are disquieting but also urgent and compelling—as he notes, “it’s only through writing that I come to my senses.”
A valuable historical record and a strangely stylish, hypnotic literary work.Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-157553-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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
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