.
The self-portrait of a young man, now the CEO of Intel.
Grove, chairman of the world’s largest computer-chip company and author of several management books, reaches back to his childhood years in Budapest to produce something like a Bildungsroman in the classic tradition. Born before WWII to assimilated, middle-class Jewish parents, young Andris Grof found his life torn apart with his father’s being sent to the Russian front and the Nazis taking control of Budapest. The Grofs survived the war, however, and the Communist regime that followed it, but when Russian tanks rolled into town to suppress the Hungarian revolution, Grof, then a chemistry student, took advantage of the chaos and stole across the Austrian border. From there he made it to the Bronx, talked his way into City College, and became Andy Grove, chemical engineer and American. The rest, as they say, is history. Thankfully, Grove spends little time foreshadowing his later success but instead offers a tight, simply told, extremely intimate memoir with careful attention to structure and detail: even the metaphor in the title is multifaceted, adding depth and resonance as the story moves forward. And although his family suffered during the war, Grove’s tale resembles pre-war generations of immigrant success stories; laced with a sardonic, though unmistakable, faith in the American dream, it’s like The Rise and Fall of David Lewinsky with a happy ending. Still, more than a few readers will find their eyes welling up when Grof’s mother asks young Andris, who has zealously hidden his identity during the war, to recite a Jewish prayer to a newly arrived Russian soldier. Grove, though, maintains a steady hand and keeps the tear-jerking to a minimum. The outcome, while not earth-shattering—and possibly self-indulgent on occasion—is a polished, solid portrait of a particular time and place.
.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2001
ISBN: 0-446-52859-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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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