A concise yet thorough account of a 1953 miscarriage of justice with alarming relevance today.
The short, heartbreaking life of a woman caught in the meat grinder of history.
Like British biographer and journalist Sebba, many readers first encountered Ethel Rosenberg (1915-1953) through E.L. Doctorow's fictionalized account in The Book of Daniel (1971) or in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963) and came away with a general romantic impression that she was a martyr. This riveting biography, pulling together decades of previous work on the Rosenbergs as well as chilling new evidence released in 2014, fills in the blanks and proves the case. As Sebba demonstrates, Ethel was certainly a communist, as were many liberals in her pre-McCarthy era, but she was not a spy, as was her husband, Julius. The author’s sharp portrait of Julius is decidedly unflattering, whether he is slavering for the approval of his Russian handlers or keeping silent about his wife's (non)role to increase his own meager chances of survival. On the other hand, it's clear that the importance of the information he passed was exaggerated and executing him for it was barbaric. Though a juror saw Ethel as "a steely, stony, tight-lipped woman…the mastermind" of the operation, Sebba suggests that nothing could be further from the truth. What took her down was her unshakeable loyalty to her husband and a shockingly weak legal defense against Roy Cohn and a team of prosecution hotshots, plus a hanging judge. The author compellingly narrates Ethel's early life, the course of her relationship with the brother whose perjury sent her to the electric chair, and both her difficulties as a mother and her commitment to overcoming them. Could there be a better time to review "what can happen when fear, a forceful and blunt weapon in the hands of authority, turns to hysteria and justice is willfully ignored"?
A concise yet thorough account of a 1953 miscarriage of justice with alarming relevance today.Pub Date: June 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-19863-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 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.
