Splendid, poignant prose.
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Hall (White Apples and Taste of Stone, 2006, etc.) applies his magical way with language to a history of self.
To be published on his 80th birthday, this memoir roves among a lifetime of memories, many of them unearthed by unpacking a collection of boxes inherited after his mother’s death in 1994. Despite growing up in the shadow of the Great Depression, Hall arrived early in his teens at the decision to pursue the unremunerative profession of poetry. An early anecdote, as endearing as it is audacious, describes Hall boldly refusing “with sixteen-year-old hauteur” an opportunity to audit the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference as an unpaid waiter, insisting on his right to attend as a contributing poet. Accepted on those terms, he met Robert Frost, Richard Wright and a young woman who contributed a memorable rite of passage on V-J Day. Poe, Keats and Shelley impressed upon the adolescent Hall a notion of accomplishment and experiment in style; later on, Eliot and Pound inspired him, as did late-1940s Harvard, where “no one spoke with scorn, no one made a gagging sound, no one mimed effeminacy” when the word poetry was uttered. In 1951, he moved on to Oxford, where he established a foothold in the emerging literary elite. Throughout his text, the poet draws back to those boxes from his mother’s house, filled not just with a career in retrospect but also valuable glimpses of the emerging writer in unpublished stories and poems. Hall writes with voluptuous recall, listing childhood dates and names with alacrity, providing adult reflections on his parents’ lives and his own adventures in love and fatherhood. The most heartbreaking chapters are dedicated to his late wife, poet Jane Kenyon, with whom he spent 25 years ensconced in his maternal grandparents’ New Hampshire farm. From his life and the tragedy of her loss, Hall has produced a waterfall of poems in works such as The Happy Man and Without; this touching memoir will make you want to read them all.
Splendid, poignant prose.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-618-99065-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
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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
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