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SALA’S GIFT

Name: SALA’S GIFT
Author: Ann Kirschner
ISBN: 0-7432-8938-2

MY MOTHER’S HOLOCAUST STORY

by Ann Kirschner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 7, 2006

A cold-eyed look at one woman’s incredible journey through hell and back.

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Restrained, well-handled chronicle, told primarily through letters among family members, of the five years spent by the author’s mother in Nazi labor camps.

Sala Garncarz married an American GI at the end of the war and never spoke to her children about her experiences. In 1991, at age 67 and headed for triple-bypass surgery, she handed a box of letters to her daughter. Kirschner, a New York management consultant, translated them and unraveled a terrible saga. Sala was the youngest of 11 children in Sosnowiec, Poland, which before the war enjoyed a thriving Jewish culture much like that of Lódz and nearby Bedzin. At 16, she was rebellious and determined to take her older sister Raizel’s place when the occupying Nazis selected young people from poor homes to work in the growing labor camps. Her “job” was supposed to last for six weeks, but she was instead shuttled for five years among seven camps, part of the slave-labor network that sustained the Nazis’ wartime manufacturing and construction. Part of Sala’s amazing ability to survive was no doubt due to her skill at sewing; she became a seamstress and laundress for the German officers, chosen and accepted as “one clean Jew.” She was also a leader among her peers, attractive and well-liked. Early on, she formed a protective friendship with an older woman named Ala Gertner, and relationships with various men helped her secure favored treatment. Unlike concentration camps such as Auschwitz (where most of her family perished after the roundup at Sosnowiec on Aug. 12, 1942), labor camps permitted inmates to send and receive letters, which were jealously hoarded as frail ties to family and truth. Kirschner allows her mother’s poignant story to emerge from these heartbreaking missives, filling in the gaps with a dignified, quietly eloquent connecting narrative.

A cold-eyed look at one woman’s incredible journey through hell and back.

Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2006

ISBN: 0-7432-8938-2

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Free Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006

Categories:

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)