Kumin and her husband experienced an idyllic life on their 200-acre horse farm in New Hampshire, “living a wide-open...
A posthumous publication of five essays by former Poet Laureate Kumin (And Short the Seasons: Poems, 2014, etc.), who died in 2014.
The last essay, written when she was 88 years old, shows a still-sharp, sensitive woman, happy in her life on a New Hampshire farm with her 92-year-old husband, Victor. They met at the end of World War II when she was a Radcliffe student and he, an engineer stationed at Los Alamos. Her essays, as much as her poetry, reflect her outlook on life and the importance of her animals: her horses and dogs, many now buried near the pond that she and her husband dug so many years ago. Even those not attuned to the music of poetry will be moved by her work, which is very much rooted in the rural landscape. Her eventual move toward strong political statements took her from light verse to the poetry of witness. She grew up in the 1930s and fought to become a poet against the usual attitudes against women becoming, well, much of anything. A grant in 1961 from the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study gave her the validation she needed to spur her career on. She became a staff member at Bread Loaf Writers Conference at Middlebury, Vermont, received the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for Up Country: Poems of New England, and was named poet laureate in 1981. By that point, Kumin had ensured her place among the great American poets of the 20th century. The real joy of this book is the author’s love of all things country and New England.
Kumin and her husband experienced an idyllic life on their 200-acre horse farm in New Hampshire, “living a wide-open lifestyle.” Happily, she shared that life with the rest of us through her writing.Pub Date: July 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-24633-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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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