The sculptor's third meditation on life and art (after Daybook, 1982; Turn, 1986) triumphs in its clearheadedness but fails to satisfy in its paths of resolution. As in Turn, Truitt explores the end of the life cycle, this time structuring her work around her 70th year, when she is regaled for decades of achievement with a major retrospective in New York yet penalized with mandatory retirement at the University of Maryland. The gravity of the events is unsettling; she calls herself ``officially old.'' Although she muses briefly throughout the memoir on the physical manifestations of aging- -diminished energy and the need for improved safety measures in the house—she concentrates on how her mind refines itself with age. This means engaging in the ``interplay [between past and present] that is making aging the most interesting thing that has ever happened to me.'' Such interplay involves central elements of her life—her children, her artistic career, the artists' colony Yaddo (for which she had been acting director), historical figures who embody her personal truths, the natural world around her. Her observations are wise in their understanding of limits and psychology, and true to her lifelong admiration for the Stoic philosophers, but the effect by book's end is somewhat cramped and final. Appreciated are her patches of animation, which show up in her analyses of her artworks and the work of critics, particularly those who attempt the ``invidious'' practice of ascribing motive to an artist's work. Also welcome are the quirky anecdotes, like that of the pilgrimage to one of her grade-school teachers, who informed her that—despite Truitt's view of herself as a youthful rebel—she had not been an interesting child. Though at times enervating in its stoicism and sureness, this invites thought about the intellectual flavor of life's final years. It is an honorable goal; if only this particular trip had been more involving for those acompanying Truitt.
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-81835-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1996
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
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
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