CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST

Name: CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST
Author: Alex Woolf
ISBN: 978-0-7641-6758-4

by Alex Woolf ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2014

It’s a quick skim with higgledy-piggledy page design, but it’s carefully tuned to spark thought and discussion rather than...

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A Holocaust mosaic with a particular focus on children, constructed from period photos and short extracts from diaries or survivors’ accounts.

Woolf pithily links the documentary material in a narrative and fills in historical background—properly noting at the outset that Jews weren’t the Nazis’ only targets and closing with the cogent observation that anti-Semitic violence didn’t stop with the war’s end. In between, a crazy quilt of passages in italics records the experiences of young people before and after Kristallnacht, in the Kindertransport and other flights, as hidden children (including one boy disguised as a girl), in the forced relocations to ghettos and to concentration and extermination camps. Biographical information about the authors of these testimonials ranges from little to none. Still, many have faces thanks to the many family snapshots that mingle with more journalistic photos of people being herded by soldiers, of camp facilities and of poignant artifacts. Following a provocative authorial comment that most “ordinary people” turned a blind eye to what was happening “because it was easier, in the end, to ignore something that didn’t affect them personally,” a quick look at postwar recovery efforts and commemorations is capped with a reference to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

It’s a quick skim with higgledy-piggledy page design, but it’s carefully tuned to spark thought and discussion rather than to shock alone. (timeline, websites, fiction and nonfiction bibliographies, index) (Nonfiction. 11-13)

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-7641-6758-4

Page Count: 64

Publisher: Barron's

Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014

Categories:

CHILDREN'S HISTORY

- BOOK REVIEW
NEIL ARMSTRONG
by Alex Woolf ; illustrated by Artful Doodlers

- BOOK REVIEW
THE DARK FOREST
by Alex Woolf

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GHOST TOWNS OF THE AMERICAN WEST

by Raymond Bial ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2001

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Bial (A Handful of Dirt, p. 299, etc.) conjures up ghostly images of the Wild West with atmospheric photos of weathered clapboard and a tally of evocative names: Tombstone, Deadwood, Goldfield, Progress, Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickock, the OK Corral. Tracing the life cycle of the estimated 30,000 ghost towns (nearly 1300 in Utah alone), he captures some echo of their bustling, rough-and-tumble past with passages from contemporary observers like Mark Twain: “If a man wanted a fight on his hands without any annoying delay, all he had to do was appear in public in a white shirt or stove-pipe hat, and he would be accommodated.” Among shots of run-down mining works, dusty, deserted streets, and dark eaves silhouetted against evening skies, Bial intersperses 19th-century photos and prints for contrast, plus an occasional portrait of a grizzled modern resident. He suggests another sort of resident too: “At night that plaintive hoo-hoo may be an owl nesting in a nearby saguaro cactus—or the moaning of a restless ghost up in the graveyard.” Children seeking a sense of this partly mythic time and place in American history, or just a delicious shiver, will linger over his tribute. (bibliography) (Nonfiction. 9-11)

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-618-06557-1

Page Count: 48

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001

Categories:

CHILDREN'S HISTORY

- BOOK REVIEW
ELLIS ISLAND
by Raymond Bial

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SUPER SOYBEAN
by Raymond Bial

- BOOK REVIEW
WHERE WASHINGTON WALKED
by Raymond Bial

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THE CIVIL WAR AT SEA

by George Sullivan ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

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In this companion to Portraits of War: Civil War Photographers and Their Work (1998), Sullivan presents an album of the prominent ships and men who fought on both sides, matched to an engrossing account of the war's progress: at sea, on the Mississippi, and along the South's well-defended coastline. In his view, the issue never was in doubt, for though the Confederacy fought back with innovative ironclads, sleek blockade runners, well-armed commerce raiders, and sturdy fortifications, from the earliest stages the North was able to seal off, and then take, one major southern port after another. The photos, many of which were made from fragile glass plates whose survival seems near-miraculous, are drawn from private as well as public collections, and some have never been published before. There aren't any action shots, since mid-19th-century photography required very long exposure times, but the author compensates with contemporary prints, plus crisp battle accounts, lucid strategic overviews, and descriptions of the technological developments that, by war's end, gave this country a world-class navy. He also profiles the careers of Matthew Brady and several less well-known photographers, adding another level of interest to a multi-stranded survey. (source notes, index) (Nonfiction. 10-13)