Readable but sometimes maudlin, adding up to not much more than notes for a future biographer.
A portrait of the late Swedish crime novelist by a longtime friend and fellow crusading journalist.
“I’m fifty, damn it!” Thus, writes Kurdish-Swedish writer Baksi, Larsson’s last words. Felled by a heart attack, Larsson—born Karl Stig-Erland Larsson in 1954, his nom de guerre a teenage adaptation—had crammed more than a few decades of living into his sleepless days. It should come as no mystery to fans of his work, and particularly of the Millennium Trilogy, that Larsson was fascinated by the dark, hidden corners of Swedish society, and particularly by the neo-Nazi element that lay just beneath the surface and was (and is) more influential than outsiders might ever have expected. Hired as a graphic artist by a newspaper, but then drifting into investigative journalism, Larsson threw himself into the antiracist, antifascist cause, where he met Baksi, the editor of a paper that addressed immigrant issues. Larsson’s devotion to that fight and his assertions that the neo-Nazis had thoroughly infiltrated the Swedish police led to numerous death threats, and he was always in trouble with his editors—for one thing, since he refused to even pretend to objectivity. Baksi attributes his early death to stress, though the 20 cups of coffee and two or three packs of cigarettes he consumed daily probably didn’t help. Larsson’s antifascist journalism defined him, but readers outside Sweden will take greater interest in the genesis of his crime novels. Baksi provides only a little insight there, noting that Larsson composed all three books in the trilogy at the same time, writing a chapter in one book, then a chapter in the second, then a chapter in the third; he also enumerates Larsson’s many influences, from Harlan Ellison to Elizabeth George.
Readable but sometimes maudlin, adding up to not much more than notes for a future biographer.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60598-174-1
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
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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