A graceful memoir filled with pain, regret, confusion and wonder.
A difficult father’s difficult final years, affectingly told by a son who, along the way, experiences just about the entire range of human emotion.
Cooper, a novelist, memoirist and essayist (The Year of Rhymes, 2001, not reviewed, etc.), begins with an account of an offer from a publisher to write the story of his father. But the younger Cooper finds the task impossible: His father—a retired Los Angeles divorce lawyer—does not like to talk and protects his emotional life with Cerberean tenacity. Years later comes this narrative, written after his father’s death in 2000. The tale is framed by two films. The first was one his father had showed him, an 8mm production about a so-called “miracle chicken” that lived without its head. The second is a video called To Hell and Back, produced by a Christian evangelist, that dramatizes the near-death experiences of five men who saw visions of Hell. This was a gift his father’s nurse, Betty, had given her patient as he neared death. (Nurse and father were also lovers.) She was a hard-core Christian; he, a casual Jew. In between are many other stories about dealing with Dad, about suffering through the deaths of three older brothers, about beginning his writing career. Cooper includes some scenes with his lover/therapist, Brian, who seems ever flawless and unvaryingly wise—a real-life counterpart to Robert B. Parker’s Susan Silverman, that cloying lover/therapist who threatens to vitiate each of the Spenser PI novels. Cooper amuses with accounts of trying to conceal from his father some passages he’d published about the man’s marital infidelities. And there are painful episodes—taking his father to doctors, enduring his sharp sarcasm, suffering through a three-year estrangement, receiving a $2 million bill from him for “paternal services.” And then the final shot to the solar-plexus, the epitaph his father had selected: You finally got me.
A graceful memoir filled with pain, regret, confusion and wonder.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-4962-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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