The pleasures here are in the slow accretion of detail—albeit too many details on occasion—and awareness that allows O’Neill...
An unwieldy family memoir that also yields some choice scenes, centering on a brace of grandfathers interned for suspected enemy sympathies, from novelist O’Neill (This Is the Life, 1991).
It is fascinating that both of O’Neill’s grandfathers were imprisoned during WWII on suspicion that they had aided the German war effort. What was the truth to these allegations that so disrupted these families, then and later? O’Neill visits the personal landscapes of the two men: one from Ireland and the other from Turkey, the latter a narcissist and petty tyrant to his family, a bit of a prig and a skirt-chaser, the former a picaresque member of the IRA. In writing that is somber, like a long day of rain, O’Neill conjures a portrait of the men: Joseph Dakad from Mersin, Turkey, a town of verandas and gardens and large stone houses, arrested in the Levant on charges that he was a possible spy, perhaps aiding the Jewish underground—but the more compelling case is that he was interned while on a lemon-buying trip for no better reason than he was Turkish. The cruelty of his jail time is excruciating to read, full as it is of suicide attempts, poisonings, and repeated threats of execution, all detailed in the testimony Dakad wrote after the three-and-a-half-year ordeal was over. Grandfather O’Neill’s internment is set within the context of IRA activity at the time of the war and the fact that he was a vibrant member of the Republicans. Nonetheless, their lives thereafter were shrouded in a secrecy that took a deep toll on the family and served as testament to living “in extraordinarily hateful and hazardous places and times,” one that required an understanding and forgiveness that both spurred and is a result of this book.
The pleasures here are in the slow accretion of detail—albeit too many details on occasion—and awareness that allows O’Neill to create an abiding image of a two places during a moment in history.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-86207-288-4
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Granta
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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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