An emotionally raw and uncompromising memoir.
A British journalist and nonfiction writer’s account of how he came to uneasy terms with the accidental death of his 14-year-old son.
When Harding (The House by the Lake: One House, Five Families, and a Hundred Years of German History, 2016, etc.) lost his son, Kadian, on a cycling trip, the irony seemed too cruel. Twenty-five years before, he had met his wife and Kadian’s mother while doing a charity bike ride across the United States. A dedicated journalist “too busy to be a father…too irresponsible,” he had not wanted children; but when Kadian and, later, a younger daughter were born, he fell “totally in love.” Harding remembers the death and too-brief life of his son, a “Prince Charming” of a boy who loved lizards, bicycles, and Apple electronics. He also offers a stark portrait of his own anguish. Time—along with the contented life he knew—seemed to end the moment his son died. Trying to make sense of the tragedy, Harding moves between past and present, joy and sorrow, to create a sense of the traumatic inner fracturing he experienced. Guilt further compounded his grief. Not only did he feel anger at his inability to shepherd his daughter and wife through loss. He also wrestled with the overwhelming sense that, in his role as family protector, he was to blame for his son’s death. Bewildered and struggling to cope with PTSD, Harding searched for and found a word—kampu—used by a group of Australian Aborigines to describe the parent of a dead child. Sympathy from those around him as well as the work of memorializing Kadian helped gradually assuage the author’s pain. Yet Harding realized a new truth—that his purpose would be “forever questioned, in doubt”—had come to define his “imperfect” life as a kampu. Both eloquent and heart-rending, Harding’s book is not only a grieving father’s testament of love to his dead son. It is also a reminder of the fragility of life and human relationships.
An emotionally raw and uncompromising memoir.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-06509-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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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