A hit.
A moving, absorbing journal of life on stage and at home.
A young (early 30s) veteran of stage (Rent) and screen (Adventures in Babysitting; A Beautiful Mind; the upcoming film adaptation of Rent), Rapp here makes an impressive debut as a writer, bringing a keen actor’s sense of detail, timing and pathos to the page. He opens with vivid descriptions of auditions, workshops and early performances of the musical Rent, with which he had become involved as an actor soon after its inception. His production log gaining momentum, he shifts abruptly yet skillfully to home in Joliet, Ill., where doctors discover a malignant tumor growing on his mother’s adrenal gland. Narratives entwine as Rapp reveals how his mother’s heartbreaking demise, his work in a major musical hit and his turbulent relationships with four men eventually, if painfully, empower his acting and enrich his life. Rapp sharply brings to life a series of inherently dramatic moments. There are the tumultuous performances of Rent, especially the one given for the parents and friends of Rent’s composer Jonathan Larson after Larson dies on the eve of the show’s explosive success. There are accounts of romantic yet tortured personal relationships. But most notably, there is the story of Rapp’s relationship with his mother. Clearly, mother and son had forged a bond after the mother divorced and as her son found work as a young actor. Still, their relationship remained tendentious, especially over the issue of Rapp’s homosexuality. Flying home on days off from Rent, Rapp eventually establishes touching rapport with his gravely ill mother. Writing with painful sensitivity of a final, wrenching farewell as he confronts her lifeless body, he reaches a deep, affecting level of personal expression.
A hit.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-6976-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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