A short but entertaining, thoroughly engaging study on the agony of filial influence.
Irish literary geniuses and their fathers: three compelling portraits that measure just how far the apple falls from the tree.
Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, and James Joyce weren’t just three of the greatest writers of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. As Irish-born novelist and critic Tóibín (Humanities/Columbia Univ.; House of Names, 2017, etc.) demonstrates, they also suffered serious daddy issues. If Wilde had exalted notions of his own class and intellect, consider that his father, William, was a man of extraordinary accomplishments: doctor, voluminous writer on travel, medicine, and folklore, archaeologist, and statistician. He was also knighted by the queen and lived as he wished. Neither he nor Oscar’s mother, Jane, followed the rules. If Oscar shared their “sense of nobility and their feeling that they could do whatever they wanted,” it didn’t always work out as well for him. William suffered a bruising moral scandal but basically emerged unscathed; his son, decades later, wouldn’t fare so well. Yeats’ father, John, was a painter who couldn’t finish a painting, even the self-portrait that consumed his final years. Sons William and Jack took the negative example to heart, taking pride “in finishing almost everything they started.” Joyce paid homage to John Stanislaus Joyce in the very last line of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.” The older man was perpetually drunk, broke, and abusive; his son deserted him in life and redeemed him in art. “He allows him,” Tóibín writes, “to be the man he is with his friends rather than with his family.” Joyce said of Ulysses, “the humour of [it] is his; its people are his friends. The book is his spittin’ image.”
A short but entertaining, thoroughly engaging study on the agony of filial influence.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8517-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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