Quietly reflective and gorgeously written, though somewhat meandering.
A daughter chronicles her journey to understand the complexities of silence, myth-making and taboo that have shaped her family’s history.
When Fanny Howe and Carl Senna wed in 1968, their interracial union was widely regarded in liberal circles as a symbol of the promise of their generation. The relationship, however, proved disastrous for both the couple and for their children. Novelist Senna (Symptomatic, 2004, etc.) portrays a home shaped by her parents’ abusive relationship and the legacy of their equally unhappy divorce. She provides harrowing details about growing up with an irresponsible, intermittently alcoholic father and a frequently impoverished single mother. At the heart of this personal history lies the author’s search for her roots—not her mother’s well-recorded descent from the founding families of New England, but her father’s multiracial Southern background and the evasions, half-truths and unspoken stories that defined it. In the course of unraveling the mystery of her father’s parentage and following the trail of his bloodlines, Senna squarely confronts the issues of race and ethnic identity in American history. Luminous prose carries along a narrative that might otherwise have failed to hold the reader’s attention. For all its revelations of buried family secrets, her memoir does not have a particularly strong story arc; on several occasions, for example, recollections are simply presented under the title “More fragments.” The result is a compendium of fascinating and perhaps deliberately unassimilated details, rather than a sustained narrative of satisfying self-discovery.
Quietly reflective and gorgeously written, though somewhat meandering.Pub Date: May 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-374-28915-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
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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