Brief, clever and frank—a good gift for Father’s Day.
Lewis (The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, 2006, etc.) updates and expands his Slate series on the business of parenting.
After the birth of each of his three children, the author promptly drew up notes on how he tried manfully to fill the demanding job of fatherhood. As wife and family CEO Tabitha provided guidance, the generally inattentive and distracted Lewis recorded the nuttiness of raising daughters Quinn and Dixie and their little brother Walker. It’s an engaging journal that selectively details how Dad grew up as well, as caution replaced airy hope and emotion displaced rationality. The first child was, for a while, subjected to the vicissitudes of living in Paris and Gallic notions of childrearing; the French experience seems to have made her a cool analyst of any situation. Back stateside, a second girl was born and sibling rivalry erupted. In California, the couple’s third child arrived, and Dad elucidates the effects of scant sleep, management of Mom’s postpartum melancholy and infant Walker’s frightening illness. “If you want to feel the way you’re meant to feel about the new baby,” writes Lewis, “you need to do the grunt work.” Only with eternal vigilance can fathers insure the well-being and personal development of their progeny. Lewis also follows the trail explored by Dr. Cosby and others investigators of fatherhood, and he includes a riff on his personal surgery—no more children are expected in the Lewis household.
Brief, clever and frank—a good gift for Father’s Day.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-06901-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
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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