Lord Peter Wimsey’s creator turns her attention—and correspondence—to the Lord Himself. In this second volume of letters, Sayers switches roles from beloved detective novelist to an increasingly well-regarded if sometimes beleaguered Christian playwright. It’s a testament to her strength as a writer and thinker that Sayers confines her new role —not [to] prophet, but only sort of painstaking explainer of official dogma.— These letters include lively, substantive arguments with religious leaders, politicians, collaborators, and detractors. The war years were productive ones for Sayers, who wrote five plays for the stage and others for radio, lectured, wrote articles, and published two books, all concerning Christianity. Sayers commendably turns her pen’s power to the war itself, seizing the opportunity to connect religion with reality. On September 10, 1939, one week after Great Britain went to war with Germany, Sayers wrote to a Christian newsletter editor that the Church ought to “say something loud and definite” about what’s happening in the world. She’s at her finest when she corrects distortions of her work and responds to sincere inquiries, which in turn inspire thoughtful explication. With humility, intelligence, clarity, and an occasional barb, she eschews ignorance. Her task is to imaginatively explain Christian doctrine, which, she reminds her correspondents, isn’t her creation: “I didn’t think it was ‘my’ theology exactly; I thought it was the Church’s.” The price of this isn’t zealotry but monotony. With the exception of a scattered reference to her husband and some letters to her adolescent “unacknowledged” son, her letters focus almost exclusively on Christianity. Interestingly, the mystery surrounding her son gets solved, though not in her letters—Reynolds appends to this volume particulars about Sayers’s son, thus filling in a gap in his biography Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul (1993). Followers of Wimsey’s sleuthing may not enjoy following Sayers’s prolix letters on Christianity.
Pub Date: April 17, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18127-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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