A tortured love letter from son to mother, well worth reading.
In this interview-based memoir with hints of a mystery, a man tries to get to the bottom of his mother’s troubled life.
Debut memoirist Glascoe opens his story at the nursing home where his mother, Maggie, is in the end-of-life stage with Alzheimer’s. He then begins his search of the past in their native Scotland and in Toronto, where Glascoe’s family had immigrated when he was still a child. In Scotland, his father, Bob, worked in the coal mines before and after his traumatic World War II service, while Maggie supported the family with factory defense work. Living close to the bone, it wasn’t a happy marriage, yet it lasted right up until Bob committed suicide and Maggie’s Alzheimer’s began to manifest. But had she been seriously unbalanced long before that? Glascoe gathers recollections from his estranged brother, his nephew, his daughter, his wife and others, probing what they remember and what they feel—anything that could shed light on the life of this passionate, intelligent but stymied and contentious woman. Memories conflict, and many of these people are in denial. Glascoe learns more about the family’s messy dynamics than he ever realized; in fact, it may all be a fool’s errand with no satisfying answers, and he may never truly know his mother and her dark motivations. In an ironic twist, the funeral home misplaces then “finds” her ashes, so Margaret McGregor Glascoe is as elusivea figure in death as she was in life. Aware and witty, Glascoe is a talented writer. The chapters adroitly toggle between his weekly visits with his mother in a Toronto nursing home and his interviews with everyone who might illuminate his search. The nursing home scenes can be rather depressing, and he captures that despair and absurdity perfectly. In an eloquent late chapter that could stand by itself, he reminds readers that Maggie was like most of us: We will never be famous or exceedingly celebrated, but we deserve to be remembered and loved.
A tortured love letter from son to mother, well worth reading.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491854037
Page Count: 192
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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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