An evocative, superbly written tale of a woman's journey to self-understanding. To young Aussie Brooks, the name of the street on which she lives, Bland Street, says it all. Bright and restless, she yearns for far more exciting, cosmopolitan venues than what she considers the backwater city of Sydney. And so Brooks tries to alleviate her intense wanderlust by gathering pen pals from around the world. Through them she figures she can live vicariously until she's old enough to leave this pit-stop of a country. In due course, she writes to Joannie, an American who summers in Switzerland and Martha's Vineyard; to Janine, a French girl whose provincial life surprises Brooks the adolescent but becomes an object of envy for Brooks the adult; Cohen, an Israeli teen who satisfies Brooks's fascination with the Jewish faith; and motley others. At length, Brooks (Nine Parts of Desire, 1995) does indeed find a way to live out her dream. An award-winning Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent, she becomes the paper's ``fireman,'' a moniker given to reporters who are able to cover particularly difficult situations and topics. Five wars and thousands of frequent-flier miles later, Brooks finds herself back in Sydney, in midlife going through family artifacts as she awaits her father's death. She comes across a bundle of old letters from her pen pals and decides to track them down. Foreign Correspondence is the story of Brooks's quest and her coming of age in the '60s and '70s. Alternately stirring and humorous, it offers an incisive emotional and spiritual travelogue, as well as the chronicle of an era. Particularly poignant are the sections devoted to Joannie, Brooks's alter ego, who dies an early death from anorexia. Brooks discovers what many of us learn only as we age—that there's no place like home. (8 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-48269-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
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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