A feebly written profile in courage. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
A Jewish nurse recalls her myriad adventures in WWII as a spy operating under the noses of the Nazis.
Cohn, who grew up in French Lorraine but spoke German fluently, begins in 1945. Posing as a German nurse, she is about to slip into enemy territory as an intelligence agent. She ends the first chapter with Nazis pointing weapons at her, then invites us to wait as she fills in the intervening autobiographical detail. Born in 1920, Cohn experienced the Holocaust firsthand. Like many others, she and her family found themselves gradually isolated, then singled out for arrest and deportation. (A sister died at Auschwitz; her lover was executed for his resistance activities.) A determined young woman whose features the Nazis did not consider “Jewish,” Cohn was able to acquire some nurse’s training. When Paris was liberated, she joined the French army and by January 1945 was working undercover. She went on a number of dangerous missions (principally to detect enemy troop locations) and after the war returned to nursing, including a stint in Indochina. She eventually married, raised a family, moved to California. If all is to be believed, Cohn was a remarkable woman: she chastised Nazis to their faces, intimidated the prisoners she interrogated, learned to drive a stick-shift in one hour, possessed a photographic memory, verbally chastened a would-be rapist so severely that he not only abandoned his assault but offered to marry her, attracted the amorous attentions of most of the men she met, was a crack shot, survived falls through the ice, bullets, tanks, and traitors. Meanwhile, the prose—with an assist from novelist Holden (Farm Fatale, 2002, etc.)—is not worthy of the subject. Bristling with clichés, the text features long passages of humdrum dialogue (recalled verbatim from a half-century ago?) and has all the stylistic sophistication of a YA novel.
A feebly written profile in courage. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-609-61054-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2002
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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