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YOURS, FOR PROBABLY ALWAYS

MARTHA GELLHORN'S LETTERS OF LOVE AND WAR, 1930-1949

An engrossing collection that burnishes Gellhorn’s reputation as an astute observer, insightful writer, and uniquely brave...

Loneliness, love, and a rebellious spirit are revealed through a writer’s intimate letters.

Somerville makes an impressive book debut with a life of novelist, journalist, and intrepid war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), told through a captivating selection of her letters to friends, family, husbands, and lovers. The volume is enriched by Somerville’s biographical narrative and her decision to include responses of many recipients and, in some cases, letters between individuals who were especially significant in Gellhorn’s life: letters, for example, between Gellhorn’s second husband, Ernest Hemingway, and her mother, Edna Gellhorn. Edna was her daughter’s polestar and champion: “I love you best of anybody,” Gellhorn wrote to her before she went off to report in Vietnam. “I’ll love you as long as I live, and admire you wholeheartedly out of the whole world.” Gellhorn loved Eleanor Roosevelt, too, whom she counted as a friend and confidante. “Dearest Mrs. R.,” Gellhorn wrote, was “an absolutely unfrightened selfless woman whose heart never went wrong.” To Gellhorn’s impassioned raging against injustice, oppression, and the horror of war, Roosevelt was unfailingly sympathetic and wise but also calmly forthright about Americans’ reluctance “to do much in the way of sacrificing to help the people who are suffering in other lands.” By the time Gellhorn married Hemingway in 1940, both were already famous, and the marriage made news. But despite playful, loving letters to her “Beloved Bug,” she came to find Hemingway moody and volatile; “a man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being,” she wrote to her mother when she decided to divorce him. Although she had many affairs and countless friends, she confessed that her abiding loneliness could not “be blotted out by anyone else; my loneliness is my own cherished possession and probably my only one.”

An engrossing collection that burnishes Gellhorn’s reputation as an astute observer, insightful writer, and uniquely brave woman.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-228-10186-4

Page Count: 528

Publisher: Firefly

Review Posted Online: July 7, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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GENGHIS KHAN AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD

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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