A toff in HM’s bridewell, it’s toad-in-the-hole once more. Plan an escape. (8-page photo insert)
When last we heard of the adventures of Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare (A Prison Diary, 2003), our noble prisoner had completed three weeks of his four-year sentence for perjury, forgery, and obstruction of justice. He’s back. Of course.
Prisoner FF8282, author of many fanciful adventures (Sons of Fortune, 2003, etc.), has been transferred from maximum security HMP Belmarsh. Now he records nine weeks at medium security HMP Wayland before heading for an open prison in 2001. Still not pleased with standard accommodations, he arranges with fellow inmates for extra bedding, laundry service, and bottled water. He dines on toad-in-the-hole, beans on toast, Spam, Weetabix, and marmalade. His Lordship is busy in the pokey, attempting to fashion a flower pot, refereeing cricket matches, getting his cell redecorated, watching Jane Austen on the telly, and checking out all of Shakespeare’s plays. (“Tonight, King Lear. If only the Bard had experienced a few months in prison . . .”) A man of some sensibility, he engages with another convict, soon to return to his native Colombia, in a scheme to get a fine emerald and a fine painting by the celebrated Colombian Botero. (The plan carries the only hint of suspense, so we won’t reveal if it works.) There are sketches of friendly inmates, like “Dale (wounding with intent), Darren (marijuana only), Jimmy (Ecstasy courier), Steve (conspiracy to murder), and Jules (drug dealing)” and visits from friends and family. Other than his conventional take on the events of September 11th, this is not terribly different from his previous outing (if that’s the right word). Archer is, understandably, still unhappy with the prison system; he has ideas for reform. His text is still larded with cricketer jargon indecipherable this side of the Atlantic.
A toff in HM’s bridewell, it’s toad-in-the-hole once more. Plan an escape. (8-page photo insert)Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-33098-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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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