A brief but poetic rendering of a fraught and wild pilgrimage.
Diary of a passionate quest.
In 1974, when he was 32, acclaimed film director, writer, and producer Herzog (Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo, 2010, etc.) set out on foot from Munich to Paris with the goal of saving a dying friend, the film critic and poet Lotte Eisner. For Herzog, walking was an exercise in magical thinking. “When I’m in Paris she will be alive,” he told himself. “She must not die. Later, perhaps, when we allow it.” At that point in his career, he had completed only one movie, Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972). Dozens of works, including Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) and Fitzcarraldo (1982), lay in the future. Originally published in 1978, this raw, emotional account of his three-week journey, from late November to December, reveals an astute observer, a painterly writer, and a man desperate to achieve his goal. Like a Romantic hero, Herzog finds that nature echoes his state of mind: “Dusky desolation in the forest solitude, deathly still, only the wind is stirring.” He walked through blizzards and suffered bone-chilling cold, and when he could not find an inn for the night, he buried himself under hay in barns. Sometimes, he broke into vacant homes, taking brief refuge. He sustained himself mostly on milk and tangerines; often, he was parched with thirst. His feet, in new boots, blistered and ached. He endured pain in his knee and an Achilles tendon that swelled to twice its size. He was plagued by horseflies, and his duffel bag rubbed a hole in his sweater. Suffering, though, only spurred him on. Two weeks into the journey, he was overcome by “severe despair. Long dialogues with myself and imaginary persons.” Finally, he arrives at Eisner’s bedside: she was alive, and she lived for nine more years.
A brief but poetic rendering of a fraught and wild pilgrimage.Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8166-9732-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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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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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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