A loving tribute by turns harrowing and beautiful.
Novelist Hood’s brief, heartbreaking memoir chronicles the death of her five-year-old daughter and its soul-searing aftermath.
In 2002, Grace contracted a virulent form of strep throat. A broken arm in her ballet class, a fever that seemed to come out of nowhere, a call to the pediatrician and, writes Hood, “a day and a half after I carried her into the ER, Grace died.” The book opens with the author’s description of the interminable hours in the hospital, watching as Grace cycled from near-comatose to “better” to dead. Though she’s mined this material before in her fiction (The Knitting Circle, 2007, etc.), Hood’s terror and agony are once again fresh. Watching her daughter go into cardiac arrest, she writes, “I screamed, ‘Gracie! Gracie! Gracie!’ so loud and so often that my throat remained dry for days afterwards.” The rest of the book delineates the process of grieving undergone by Hood, her husband and their eight-year-old son Sam. Unable to write for a time, Hood took up knitting and thought back on her life before marriage and motherhood. She had been a young woman who effortlessly left places and people behind; then she fell in love with Manhattan, and “the one place I thought for certain I would never leave was New York City.” Her husband persuaded her to move to Rhode Island, but for years she felt it didn’t fit. The story of how she “slowly, slowly” began to find her place in this new world is as compelling as the ghastly account of Grace’s tragic end. Eventually, time started to do its healing work: Hood was again able to put words on paper, and in 2005 the family adopted a baby girl from China—born on the date Grace died.
A loving tribute by turns harrowing and beautiful.Pub Date: May 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-393-06456-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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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