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
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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
© 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.
