The fascinating story of a once-invincible man “who has made the best of the cards that life has dealt him but…revealed...
An engaging biography of the Olympic sprinter and convicted killer we thought we knew.
Carlin (Knowing Mandela: A Personal Portrait, 2013, etc.) reveals the likely impulses of Oscar Pistorius, the South African double-leg amputee and international symbol of courage and determination who shot and killed his girlfriend, model Reeva Steenkamp, on Feb. 14, 2013. The peculiar circumstances of the shooting and the globally televised trial riveted the world. The author has sufficient access to provide seemingly direct narration from the crime scene. He describes Pistorius as "almost fainting from the rotting metal stench of her wounds, battling to get a purchase on her soaked, slippery frame….” He was "howling in despair" and "beseeching God to let her live.” Carlin recounts Pistorius' triumphant racing career and persona as a brave and invulnerable athlete ("half-man, half-machine") and reveals the self-delusion necessary to mask his desire to be seen as normal (the author explains how Pistorius, who is white, was adored by all races in post-apartheid South Africa. The first disabled runner to compete in the Olympic Games, his success embodied “what all races like to see as the indomitable national spirit.” However, following that tragic night in February 2013, Pistorius' image immediately changed from "the greatest national hero for South Africans of all races since Mandela" to a calculating criminal charged with premeditated murder. Overall, Carlin's reporting is detailed and quick-moving, aside from some overly detailed sections that some readers may skim—e.g., the crafting of Pistorius’ metal and silicone running blades in Iceland; encounters with his loyal, fervent devotees ("Pistorians"). The author offers complete and absorbing coverage of this bizarre story, removing the mask from a previously one-dimensional role model.
The fascinating story of a once-invincible man “who has made the best of the cards that life has dealt him but…revealed himself to possess to an equally extreme degree the insecurities that all are prey to.”Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-229706-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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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