Truthful, dignified, and pragmatic writing.
A woman chronicles a painful divorce in this debut memoir.
Taylor remembers that she was driving on the interstate with her then-husband, Jim, when he suddenly announced, “I’m done with our marriage.” The couple had been facing tough challenges: Jim’s work had forced them to maintain a long-distance relationship for sustained periods, and his brother had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. However, there were no clear indications that Jim would request a divorce. Indeed, the shock was so great that the author says that she felt that “all the oxygen seemed to escape from the vehicle.” When they first got married, she remembers, they used to wake each morning with smiles on their faces; they’d both been divorced before, so they were committed to making their marriage work. After settling together in Summerville, South Carolina, a chain of events, including leaving her job as a teacher, led to Taylor’s feeling isolated. She writes that Jim told her that she sometimes said “hurtful” things, particularly after overindulging in wine, but she felt that her actions didn’t warrant his description of her as “selfish” and “mean.” This memoir confronts the painful, debilitating nature of divorce and offers guidance on how to survive “unexpectedly starting over” at 60. The act of putting her story on paper appears to have been a major source of catharsis for the author; she says that she’d always wanted to be a writer and that her grief helped her to complete this book. Her prose is elegantly descriptive and effortlessly precise throughout, and she speaks tenderly and directly to her readers: “You, too, have the ability to regain your confidence, abandon your hopelessness, and realize that you are not a woman to be tossed aside and forgotten.” Taylor carefully explores her own rebuilding process, including time that she spent in therapy and the crucial support that she received from her friends. Her book may act as a lifeline for other women going through similar experiences, as it offers hope for newfound happiness.
Truthful, dignified, and pragmatic writing.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-454-7
Page Count: 152
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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