An exhaustive and perhaps definitive biography of the celebrated French writer and thief (1910-86), who looks almost human through the eyes of the much tamer White (The Beautiful Room is Empty, 1988, etc.). It's to Genet's credit that, once he became famous enough to establish a public persona, he quite frankly assumed the role of a criminal outcast. The son of an unknown father and an impoverished mother, Genet was raised in a dreary succession of orphanages and foster homes. As a child, he showed signs of great intelligence and creativity, but, as a ward of the state, he couldn't be educated for anything other than manual labor. Incorrigible and fiercely independent, he turned to theft at an early age and spent most of his adolescent years in reform schools and prisons. It was during this period that he became conscious of his homosexuality; throughout the rest of his life, he tried to insulate himself in masculine societies that re-created the brutal and isolated asylums of his youth. ``Boiling over with contradictions, Genet was cruel and sensitive,'' says White, ``a moralist who stole from friends, a petty thief who forged copies of his own quite genuine masterpieces.'' Genet's early writings—Our Lady of the Flowers and The Miracle of the Rose—brought him to the attention of Cocteau and the surrealists, but it was the patronage of Sartre that made Genet famous—and that brought him a pardon from the president of France. Ironically, Genet found it more difficult to write as a free man than as a prisoner, and, in his later years, he nearly stopped working altogether. He finally left France for Morocco (where he's buried) and took up the cause of the Palestinians. A thorough and painstaking job that, however, could have been accomplished in half the space. Scholars will find Genet essential; most others will find a lot to skim. (Useful notes; 16 pages of photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1993
ISBN: 0-394-57171-1
Page Count: 848
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
IN THE NEWS
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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