Though a rather ordinary book, the narrative is relentlessly optimistic and a good source of ideas for merit badge projects.
A cheerily aspirational celebration of Americans who are making a difference.
At the beginning of their latest collaboration, Kyle, widow of “American sniper” Chris Kyle, and DeFelice (co-authors: American Wife: A Memoir of Love, War, Faith, and Renewal, 2015) proclaim that “the pioneer spirit built America,” with apologies to the Native and African peoples who paid the bill (“there is much we regret in retrospect”). Just what that spirit constitutes is a little fuzzy, but the phrase seems to translate as community-building altruism, its proponents “doing their own part to bring order to chaos and to show up for other people.” Allowing that clichés such as “our kids are our future” are just that, clichés, the authors argue that the pioneer spirit is built on the premise that we sacrifice now for a better future. You might not know it from the behavior of the boomers and Gen Xers, but as for the kids themselves, many are doing important things. One example is Alexandra Scott, a victim of neuroblastoma who used part of her short life to operate a lemonade stand that raised thousands of dollars to help children like her—and, now that she’s passed, the Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation for Childhood Cancer raises millions. “All of this,” write the authors, “because one little girl decided to open a lemonade stand in her front yard…and because thousands of other kids decided to copy her.” The authors also discuss the work of veteran Micah Fink, a New Yorker who takes fellow veterans on horseback rides in the Montana wilderness to work through PTSD and “guilt at not being ‘O.K.,’ whatever that means.” Other profiles concern an autistic Appalachian Trail hiker and a blind marathon runner, with many others centering on veterans of recent wars.
Though a rather ordinary book, the narrative is relentlessly optimistic and a good source of ideas for merit badge projects.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-268371-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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
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