Well-grounded social history.
A wide-ranging account that persuasively demonstrates that the Fox sisters’ role in the founding of modern spiritualism was more a reflection of mid-19th-century culture than an occult phenomenon.
Setting the story firmly in the context of their times, former TV producer Weisberg gives an informative history of a turbulent and fast-changing era. She begins in 1848, when the Maggie and Kate Fox, 14 and 11, respectively, still living with their parents in Hytheville, New York, claimed that they were able to speak to the dead. These claims resonated with thousands of people, and spiritualism became increasingly popular. Arguing that the Fox sisters’ influence was a product of a society in transition, the author offers numerous examples of such ongoing changes: the effects of the invention of the telegraph, evolving attitudes toward women, an expanding frontier, scientific discoveries that were calling into question aspects of conventional faith, and a growing belief in an afterlife without eternal damnation. More somberly, the mortality rate, especially for children, was still very high, and spiritualism appealed to grieving parents. Weisberg also relates how the sisters, soon famous, befriended reformers and abolitionists and began holding meeting in New York City, where they were taken up by luminaries like Horace Greeley. But by their 30s, they began to find the work onerous and, in the case of Maggie, shameful. Courted briefly by the noted Arctic explorer Elisha Kane, who disapproved of her work, Maggie admitted publicly in1888 that communication with the dead was impossible, though she later recanted. By then the movement was in decline, as better health care extended life and new technology changed thinking. The sisters both became alcoholics and died in poverty. Weisberg admits to being ambivalent about them, but suggests that they offered comfort in uncertain times.
Well-grounded social history.Pub Date: April 13, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-056667-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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