Tender, vulnerable portraits of family and friends.
The author, a life-threatening-illness support leader and wife of the late actor Patrick O’Neal, recalls a roller-coaster life that steadied into meaningful depth.
With a light hand, O’Neal makes it clear that her life could have taken her to a very different place than where she is now as an emotional-support figure at Friends In Deed, a crisis center for critically ill people that she founded. Before she met her husband she was already an actress and successful model, and he brought just that much more glamour to her days. They lived in a series of envy-inducing apartments, moved in the company of tony friends and had the wherewithal to act on their desires. O’Neal recounts plenty of tribulations as well—her husband’s drug and drinking problems, a son who appeared to be taking after his father, the deaths of friends and acquaintances, which began to steamroll as the AIDS epidemic made its way through her milieu of artists. The deaths tripped a switch. “I could not live with the idea that someone was ill, frightened, alone, and not try to do something about it,” she writes. Any do-gooder suspicions are neatly laid to rest by O’Neal’s frequent skirmishes with her motivations and her candor about her ill-preparedness for such passion. “I think crisis holds a real seduction for me, and certainly there is some magical thinking involved,” she writes. “There’s a primal place in me that thinks that if I do my very best to help other people in their crises, disaster will stay away from me and mine.” Eventually, many of the “me and mine” became the men and women who found themselves at Friends In Deed, a handful of whom are profiled here with respect and honor. O’Neal made her share of mistakes, and her spiritual quest to face death is rocky, but she doesn’t lose sight of those who benefit from her compassion.
Tender, vulnerable portraits of family and friends.Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58322-906-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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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