The narrative is filled with gems if readers are willing to struggle through the disorganization.
The noted American Urban Radio Networks White House Correspondent and CNN analyst focuses on her experiences as a black woman reporter trying to do her job amid the hostile first year of the Trump presidency.
Before Trump entered office, Ryan (At Mama's Knee: Mothers and Race in Black and White, 2016, etc.) covered Republican and Democratic administrations without achieving widespread recognition, reporting mostly for AURN since the late 1990s. Her recognition factor shot up significantly in 2017 due to the combative rhetoric aimed at the author by Trump, his White House press secretaries, and White House staffers, most notably Omarosa Manigault-Newman. After Ryan asked Trump openly about his racism, she became a hero to many citizens (in 2017, she was named Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalist) and a pariah to others (she has received many death threats from Trump supporters). Regarding her seemingly overnight fame, the author notes that she has conducted herself in the same journalistic manner for two decades but that in an era of “fake news” and “alternative facts,” ideologues think of her as somehow biased against Trump and Republicans. The writing is mostly clear but is slowed by clichéd language—e.g., “throw in the towel.” Each chapter is worthy on its own, yet they are arranged in a puzzling manner. A chapter about health care policy precedes a chapter about Ryan unwillingly becoming the story instead of staying out of the spotlight, and policy-heavy chapters about immigration policy, indifference to historically black colleges, and women in the workplace materialize out of nowhere. Throughout the book, the author clarifies her viewpoint (shared by many) that she respects the office of the presidency but finds Trump and many of his staff members incompetent at best and often mean in petty ways.
The narrative is filled with gems if readers are willing to struggle through the disorganization.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5381-1336-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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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