Everyone with a terminally ill parent should read this spare account, which is damn near perfect.
The executive editor of Tin House magazine perfectly captures a middle-aged rite of passage: returning home to help a parent die.
Montgomery grew up in Massachusetts. Jovial “Big Dad,” though emotionally distant, fiercely loved his three kids. Mumzy was a lush, larger than life except when passed out from too much gin. Their offspring escaped in various ways; Montgomery herself married and moved to the West Coast after several fraught vocational crises and love affairs. When her father, whom she had always tried to please, was diagnosed with stomach cancer, she headed east to care for him. Her debut memoir delineates Big Dad’s sickness, Mumzy’s ineffectual courage, the author’s helpless attempts to micro-manage her father’s diet and to control the experience by taking small, useless notes at the doctor’s office. It captures the awkward pressure to have meaningful conversations before it’s too late, the guilt over leaving ailing parents for even an hour, let alone a weekend. Montgomery expertly interweaves the present-tense narration, which describes Big Dad’s decline in the late 1990s with occasional glances back to her ’60s childhood, which are well placed and never gratuitous. Kudos also for her careful attention to the emotional thickets of siblinghood; she subtly renders the struggles and strains among a brother and two sisters suddenly called on to act like adults in a situation that encourages regression to childishness. The author lays bear the trials of alcoholism with a light touch, never descending into whining or acrimony: “I will never be able to explain my mother, but I will most likely spend my life trying. . . . How do you explain that your mother drinks gin and tonics for breakfast? You don’t.”
Everyone with a terminally ill parent should read this spare account, which is damn near perfect.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-9263-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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