Drivel about a driveler.
The superficial life of the superficial author of all those superficial, lubricious and extraordinarily popular sleaze-fests of the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, when ghost writers replaced the dying doyen of the “dirty novel.”
Wilson (Beautiful Shadow: The Life of Patricia Highsmith, 2003, etc.), hasn’t come up with much here. From an early age, Harold Robbins (born Rubin) gleefully lied about his life, inventing episodes and characters as facilely as he did later at his typewriter. So his biographer was forced to look at public records like census data and high-school attendance sheets, to conduct interviews with survivors (neither of Robbins’ two daughters offers much here) and to wax creative. For example, Wilson begins each chapter with a Robbinsian passage along the lines of “next to having sex, driving a cool car was one of the greatest pleasures of his life” and generally ends with a brisk, “keep-on-reading” sentence such as “but even fiercer sex and censorship battles lay ahead.” This ludic silliness aside, Wilson settles for skating along the admittedly high-gloss surface of Robbins’ life. Yes, his was a Horatio Alger–style tale; Robbins actually rose from stock boy to pen The Carpetbaggers and other lucrative titles. And, yes, the text makes it patent—and ultimately rather dull—that Robbins liked sex. Lots of it. Wilson tries hard to establish that it was women the author liked, not the services they provided, but after witnessing some of Robbins’ escapades and “preferences” (prostate massages are among the milder ones), readers may well want to head for the shower. The man could sell books, though: 750 million or so, which for a while provided him with villas, yachts, fast cars and fast lanes and accommodating (young) women. Massive debts and a wheelchair, however, were his ultimate fate.
Drivel about a driveler.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59691-008-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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