As literate and witty as a Comden-and-Green lyric, the noted Broadway and Hollywood wordsmith's memoir concentrates on her non- working life, with a few nods to famous friends thrown in as a bonus. Comden's evocative account of growing up in Brooklyn during the 1920s captures a world in transition: A hallway light fixture has an electric bulb on the bottom and a gas fixture (``cheaper to run'') on top; her well-to-do grandfather still has nightmares about hiding from the Cossacks back in Russia; her relatives shake their head when Uncle David marries a 19-year-old flapper who smokes, wears red nail polish, and (worst of all) is Rumanian. As the lively anecdotes accumulate, we become acquainted with Comden's dignified, ladylike mother; her warm, nurturing father; and the author herself—smart, not so pretty, fascinated with words even as a child. The chapter on her late husband, Steve Kyle, is less compelling, though obviously heartfelt, and the obligatory sketches of buddies like Leonard Bernstein, Lauren Bacall, and James Jones seem rather perfunctory, though there is a marvelous, faintly malicious tale of Charlie Chaplin giving an impromptu performance with Comden at a party and feeling obliged to upstage her even in that casual setting. The author dulls the impact of genuinely funny lines like ``I got my decorator through my therapist. Doesn't everyone?'' by descending on occasion into archness; the fact that she discovered a largely French-speaking congregation at an Upper East Side synagogue hardly justifies the crack `` `Vous ne pouvez jamais revenir chez vous,' as Tomas Loup (Thomas Wolfe) once wrote.'' Her painful, honest depiction of son Alan's descent into drug addiction and eventual death from AIDS in 1990 is more representative of the book's better moments, as is her brisk chronicle, both amused and outraged, of the indignities her aging body has visited on her. Despite some glib patches, surprisingly sincere and moving. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-70579-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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