A well-told story. (Illustrations)
A biography of a significant figure of the Gilded Age who is now generally ignored by historians of popular culture.
In 1853, young Heinrich Hilgard borrowed the surname of an acquaintance and left Bavaria with more hubris than prospects. He arrived in America as Henry Villard, possessing not a dollar and not a word of English. Promptly acquiring proficiency in the language, he practiced the emerging profession of political reporter, traveling with candidate Stephen A. Douglas in his campaign against Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil War, the new journalist became a pioneering war correspondent, and much of the book details Villard’s witness of battles from First Manassas to the Crater. After Appomattox, the young man went West (where he met a discomfited Horace Greeley) to report on the Pikes Peak gold rush. The evident need for western transportation brought Villard to the railroad business, thence to Wall Street. Eventually, he ran a newspaper, controlled the Northern Pacific Railroad, and helped Thomas Edison found General Electric. He was proud, frequently disdainful, and prejudiced. As his fortunes waxed and waned, he battled the most malevolent robber barons, yet his reputation remained relatively intact (muckraker Gustavus Meyers called him “a man of remarkable character and enterprise”). He knew the eminent personages of his time: Lincoln and Edison, Jay Gould and James Gordon Bennett, a squad of Union generals and William Lloyd Garrison (who became his esteemed father-in-law). Villard’s is a prototypical American story, worthy of Horatio Alger. Yet, if he is remembered at all today, it’s likely to be by New Yorkers who know the Madison Avenue palazzo he inhabited for just a few months, now straddled by the Helmsley Palace Hotel. De Borchgrave and her collaborator, a translator of German and Italian texts, rely heavily on their subject's memoirs, not always the most reliable of sources. In this case the resultant biography is quite credible and eminently creditable.
A well-told story. (Illustrations)Pub Date: March 20, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-48662-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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.
