Slight but not unrewarding, this memoir of a feminist's midlife retreat toward nature and spirituality escapes solipsism by virtue of its terse writing and agreeable epiphanies. Shulman, best known for the novel Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (1972), centers her narrative on a small house on an island beach in Maine, a cabin she affectionately calls ``the nubble.'' Living there, she strips her life down to the essentials, subsisting on shellfish, wild plants, and the eponymous rainwater, getting perspective on the mad rush of cosmopolitan life. Shulman threatens to make more of her time at the nubble than it warrants: In the absence of tangible links to the events at hand, repeated invocations of her erstwhile participation in the protest and women's movements seem little more than shallow posturing; and on a more mundane level, it hardly seems a revelation that her rural sojourn should cure her of nail-biting. Still, the experiences she shares prove rewarding enough; her story is affecting in spite of her own excessive claims for it. Limpid prose enables Shulman to fashion satisfying episodes from raw material ranging from the preparation of seaweed for the table to the visits of an old friend. Away from the nubble, we follow the author over the course of a decade or so as she divorces, moves to Colorado to take a teaching post, and travels to Europe. Again, her attempts to develop an environmentalist theme fall short, and she doesn't manage to make her workaday writer's life seem real on the page. But friends and family are rounded characters, and her eye for the resonant detail creates scenes that will appeal to her peers. Inconsequentiality seems to be the point here—as readers marooning themselves at their own summer havens will perhaps best understand.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-14403-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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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