Ably following his National Book Awardnominated biography of John Butler Yeats (Prodigal Father, not reviewed), Murphy creates a detailed portrait of the Yeats family that establishes it as one rivaling the Jameses for genius. ``We are not a normal family,'' confessed Yeats once to a correspondent, understating the matter. Most of the poet's biographers underestimate his family in regard to his own mythopoetic personality. His father was a brilliant conversationalist and a barrister turned bohemian painter; his elder sister, Susan (Lily), a talented embroiderer and textile designer; his younger sister, Elizabeth (Lollie), a skilled printer; and his brother, Jack, a superb painter with an international reputation. When John Butler Yeats moved his family from Ireland to London to start his painting career, his children lost their idyllic Sligo home, but Murphy stresses how this experience of straitened means and family isolation nonetheless contributed to the development of their talents. Willie and Lily grew closer and entered into William Morris's poetic and decorative household, and Lollie learned art instruction and printing. While Willie established himself as a poet with the likes of George (A.E.) Russell, Lady Gregory, and Ezra Pound, his sisters formed the Cuala Industries, where Lollie's press brought out editions of Willie and his Celtic twilight compatriots and where Lily's designs generated a stir. As Murphy makes clear with a round-up of family feuding, the Yeatses' dispositions drew unequally from both sides of their Anglo-Irish heritage: Willie, for all his dreaminess, would haughtily direct the publishing project at Cuala (which he kept afloat financially), thus infuriating the egocentric Lollie, who in turn would bear down on her sister and Cuala partner, while Jack, working apart, became the most reserved of the siblings. Murphy, if neglecting the wider artistic developments of the Irish revival around them, exhaustively chronicles the family's multifaceted creative personalities. (101 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8156-0301-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Syracuse Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
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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