Having no apparent direction, beginning or end, Fusselman’s freewheeling memoir is alternately serious and trivial,...
Musings on the nature of time, the relationship between victim and victimizer, parenting, alternative healing therapies and any other aspect of her life that strikes the author’s fancy.
Fusselman (The Pharmacist’s Mate, 2001) writes in short paragraphs, some only a sentence long, and groups them together into semi-chapters, each headed by the figure eight. The number’s significance is not made clear, but it may represent repetition; the author writes of her experience as a figure skater in the 1970s, when she repeatedly practiced executing an eight on ice. Viewed from another angle, the figure could symbolize infinity. Fusselman, who speaks directly to the reader, is not inhibited by rules about writing; her mini-essays flow in whatever direction her mind chooses. When her editor finds one childhood incident unbelievable, she includes the editorial discussion that ensues, bringing the reader into the writing process. Her reflections, which could be entries in a personal journal, include references to her encounters with a pedophile when she was four, her reactions to sessions with a hands-on healer and her child’s sessions with a craniosacral therapist, her efforts to sleep-train her two-year-old son and her motorcycle-riding lessons. She also offers her thoughts on such abstractions as joy, reality, space and time. Her fixation with a song by the Beastie Boys, the lyrics to which she paraphrases at considerable length, may puzzle readers who are not into the group, but her interpretation of it as a complex piece of artistry is fascinating.
Having no apparent direction, beginning or end, Fusselman’s freewheeling memoir is alternately serious and trivial, entertaining and exasperating.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-58243-368-2
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
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.
