A fascinating memoir by a 21st-century original.
How does a fictional character write a real memoir? Very, very well.
Most readers who are active on social media are aware of Duchess Goldblatt, the acerbic yet warmhearted doyenne of Twitter, represented by a Frans Hals portrait of an elderly woman with a stiff muff around her neck. Over the years, she’s dispensed witticisms and advice to her 24,000-plus followers, many of them writers, without giving away any clues about the person behind the persona. When she finally met her No. 1 fan, Lyle Lovett (it’s a long story), he was shocked that she wasn’t "a little old lady or a gay man!” Now, Duchess Goldblatt’s admirers can get to know her still-anonymous creator, and perhaps the biggest surprise in this striking memoir is the fact that Duchess is a name (taken from a friend’s dog), not a title, though no doubt everyone will keep calling her “Your Grace.” The author created Duchess during a terrible time: She'd lost her job, her husband had left her, and she was tormented by the part-time separation from her young son. Duchess was a way for her to lurk online, but she soon found herself carefully crafting posts, responding to everyone who wrote to her, and finding solace in the community she’d created. The book is prismatic, moving among the author’s difficult childhood, the years after her divorce, and her growing relationships with people Duchess had befriended—only a few of whom, including Lovett, have ever met her. She wrestles with the questions of whether she and Duchess are two separate people and how Duchess makes friends so easily when she herself feels almost friendless. Lovett’s manager called what she’s doing “collaborative performance art,” and that’s an apt term for it; together with Duchess’ followers, she’s created a long-term fever dream of humor, compassion, wordplay, and dog photos.
A fascinating memoir by a 21st-century original.Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-358-21677-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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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