Though the correspondence is mostly about soccer, it is also about so much more.
An epistolary exploration of soccer and life.
In 2014, the highly regarded Scandinavian writers Knausgaard (My Struggle: Book Five, 2016, etc.) and Ekelund exchanged letters during the FIFA World Cup in Brazil. This book is the result of their exchanges. (It seems clear that they planned to produce a book based on their correspondence). Ekelund was in Brazil, an almost home-away-from-home for him, while Knausgaard was home, mostly in his adopted Sweden. Both are acclaimed writers in their own region, with growing reputations internationally, especially Knausgaard and his bestselling autobiographical My Struggle novels. Both love soccer, and thus the sport and especially the World Cup provide the connecting line for these insightful and discursive letters that reflect not only on o jogo bonito but also on seemingly everything else under the sun. From gender politics to family, food to writing, love and loss, tragedy and triumph, thoughts of suicide and feelings of ecstasy, and from the mundane aspects of daily life to the things that make life worth living (sometimes these are one and the same), the authors cover vast swaths of the human experience while always returning to their differing perspectives on the soccer they witnessed in 2014. For readers willing to accept these letters on their own terms and go with the sometimes stream-of-consciousness ramblings of two men deeply committed to the writer’s art, the rewards are great. However, there may not be enough soccer for fans expecting a work focusing on the sport, and what strikes some readers as joyful perambulations with two thoughtful interlocutors may strike others as self-indulgent and meandering. But for those for whom these letters resonate, the effect is powerful and cascading, a pleasing waterfall of imagery and intellect.
Though the correspondence is mostly about soccer, it is also about so much more.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-27983-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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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