Further evidence, if any were needed by now, of Goodall’s stunning intellectual acuity, broad curiosity, courage, decency,...
The second of a two-volume autobiography (Reason for Hope, 1999) in letters that allows readers to enter the daily life of famed primatologist Goodall.
To label Goodall a primatologist feels particularly limiting after reading these letters, for they reveal her as an astute behaviorist of many creatures (including her husbands), a wonderful mother, someone deeply moved by (and moved to act on) the cruelty inflicted on humans and animals, a reveler in life, and a survivor. Editorial notes from Peterson set the stage, and allow for an understanding of Goodall’s more elliptical remarks. The correspondence ushers us into Goodall’s everyday world—sometimes in Europe and America, but often in the field, where her love of her son Grub melds with her love of such places as Arusha, in Tanzania: “Grub and I have spent our nights at the ‘Golden Grass Den.’ In the evening the setting sun gives every dried blade a gleam of gold, brilliant as metal.” Although chimpanzees have been the focus of her lifelong work, Goodall’s interests are vast (“We have been doing a number of tests on Egyptian Vultures in Ngorongoro Crater with reference to their stone throwing behavior”), and her reflections are broad-ranging and wide. Although she speaks of her husbands with considerable reserve (it was during this period in her life that she divorced Hugo van Lawick and lost Derek Bryceson to cancer), her descriptions of animals are vibrant and arresting—speaking of one of her chimps who was captured for medical research, she observes, “The easiest and most common way to acquire a baby chimpanzee in Africa is to shoot the mother and then pull off the clinging infant.”
Further evidence, if any were needed by now, of Goodall’s stunning intellectual acuity, broad curiosity, courage, decency, and goodness.Pub Date: July 12, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-12520-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
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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