Rosenkranz argues that in 1922, Einstein was a man of his times when it came to the West’s images of the Orient, and “we...
An eye-opening collection of travel diaries from the legendary scientist and thinker.
In October 1922, Einstein (1879-1955) and his wife set out on a nearly five-month voyage to the Far East, Palestine, and Spain, financed by the lectures he would give. He kept a 182-page detailed diary with drawings, which is now being published for the first time. Rosenkranz (Einstein Before Israel: Zionist Icon or Iconoclast?, 2011, etc.), senior editor and assistant director of the Einstein Papers Project, has provided a translation with facing facsimile pages, additional texts, photographs, and a lengthy historical introduction. In what the editor describes as a “quirky” and “telegraphic manner,” Einstein recorded his impressions of things he had seen, people he met, and some musings on science, philosophy, art, and world events. Rosenkranz is convinced that Einstein had no intention of publishing it, and he writes that in “spite of his public advocacy of human rights, it was science, not humanity, that lay at the center of Einstein’s universe.” As he worked on the diary, Rosenkranz became troubled by entries that “amounted to xenophobic comments about some of the peoples he encountered.” Many will find Einstein’s comments quite shocking. On the Chinese mainland, he describes an “industrious, filthy, lethargic people.” They squat at eateries “like Europeans do when they relieve themselves out in the leafy woods.” The “children are spiritless,” and it “would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races.” He had a more favorable opinion of the Japanese—“unostentatious, decent, altogether very appealing”—and yet, Rosenkranz notes, he was “mystified by their alleged lack of scientific curiosity.” At Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall, “obtuse ethnic brethren pray loudly….Pitiful sight of people with a past but without a present.”
Rosenkranz argues that in 1922, Einstein was a man of his times when it came to the West’s images of the Orient, and “we should not be too judgmental in our assessment.” That may be difficult for some readers, but the editor offers an accurate portrait of the Einstein of that era.Pub Date: June 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-691-17441-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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