Lackluster biography of the turn-of-the-century New England writer whose independent, unmarried women characters and ecological consciousness have stirred some contemporary interest. Silverthorne has written children's books (I, Heracles, 1978, etc.) and a bio of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1988—not reviewed). Jewett (1849-1909), born and raised in small-town Maine, wrote mostly about ordinary people whose ways were being condescended to by the new influx of urban summer visitors. Success came early: a story accepted by The Atlantic before her 20th birthday. Jewett's first book appeared in 1877 from the publishing house that eventually became Houghton Mifflin and that continued to publish her work, including her best-known novel, The Country of the Pointed Firs. For more than 20 years, she divided her time between Maine and the Boston home of Annie Fields, widow of editor/publisher James Fields. ``Whether or not there was a physical dimension will no doubt continue to be a fascinating question for debate,'' writes Silverthorne, who also offers the upbeat but hardly revealing information that Jewett often shared ``ideas and feelings about every subject under the sun'' and that her head was ``filled with new experiences, unforgettably scenery, and most of all the exciting acquaintances she had made.'' As a critical biography, this effort also falls short: ``As usual, different stories in the collection appealed to different reviewers....'' What a treat to discover a woman writer who was both successful and happy. But since Jewett's life seems not to have been complicated by intrinsically compelling drama, Silverthorne's failure to capture her personality and sensibility is a fatal lack. (Photographs)
Pub Date: April 20, 1993
ISBN: 0-87951-484-1
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1993
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
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