Doubtlessly more enjoyable than reading the EB itself, with lots of arcane nuggets readers can casually drop on the...
Esquire editor Jacobs (The Two Kings, not reviewed) squares off against all 32 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and returns to his corner in comic triumph.
“In the years since graduating college, I began a long, slow slide into dumbness,” he writes of the intellectual swan dive he hoped to reverse by tackling all 33,000-pages worth of the EB. Jacobs moved through it like a combine, harvesting a great swath of general knowledge—all general knowledge: “If my goal is to know everything, I can’t discriminate, even against obscure Teutonic landmarks.” The bite-sized entries suited a man “who grew up with Peter Gabriel videos, who has the attention span of a gnat on methamphetamines.” Yet the task required attention, like removing a splinter, he ruefully notes. Then again, the task is lightened here (often humorously and certainly ad infinitum) by Jacobs’s ability to self-reference a good number of the choice selections he presents, from atrophy to chess, rock tripe to year. He takes pleasing swipes at the EB’s deadpan seriousness: there will be no Tom Cruise entry, and in the 2002 edition’s grudging acknowledgement of Madonna’s existence, “you could tell the editors wrote the entry while wearing one of those sterile full-body suits people use when containing an Ebola outbreak.” Of course, Jacobs couldn’t help but try to insinuate his latest strange fact into everyday conversations, which typically ground them to an abrupt halt, and he tenders ways in which you, too, can gain an entry: get beheaded, for instance, or become a botanist, win a Nobel Prize, become a liturgical vestment. It is all enormous fun, educational even, and let’s hope that Esquire gets a cut of the deservedly juicy royalties, since Jacobs appears to have read much of the encyclopedia on the job.
Doubtlessly more enjoyable than reading the EB itself, with lots of arcane nuggets readers can casually drop on the unsuspecting like sacks of flour from a great height.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-5060-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
