A solid biography that should introduce more readers to Leigh Fermor’s work.
A fondly admiring account of the English wayfarer captures his enormously infectious spirit.
An author of nonfiction travelogues not well-known on this side of the Atlantic, Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915–2011) made his swashbuckling reputation during World War II when he and his fellow British Special Operations Executive agent W. Stanley Moss and Cretan resistance fighters abducted the Nazi general of the occupation of Crete. Subsequently, Leigh Fermor was hailed as a Greek hero and was even graced by a 1957 Hollywood film version of the escapade, Ill Met by Moonlight, based on Moss’ memoir of the same name. British author Cooper (Writing at the Kitchen Table: The Authorized Biography of Elizabeth David, 2000, etc.) was well-acquainted with the personable, loquacious Leigh Fermor and has edited his Words of Mercury, deriving much of this material from his own extensive memoirs as well as from interviews. What emerges here is the energetic, devouring spirit of the intrepid traveler, who never had the money to be a true bon vivant but who managed to find plenty of well-connected ladies to pay his bills. Channeling a restive youth between ill-suited parents who lived, separately, in India and London, “Paddy” resolved to postpone entry into the army in order to make a yearlong trek by foot through Europe starting in December 1933. It would prove his education, coming-of-age and entree into life as he forged many of the acquaintances that would direct his future, such as that of Princess Balasha Cantacuzene, a mysterious older painter of Greek-Rumanian extraction who took young Paddy in during the next several years. The war scattered many friends, yet his notoriety prompted continual interest in his travels.
A solid biography that should introduce more readers to Leigh Fermor’s work.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59017-674-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
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BOOK REVIEW
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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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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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