No matter how they feel about his politics, readers of this memoir should find the author’s humanity irresistible.
The one-time Weather Underground fugitive talks about his life as a political bogeyman.
While Ayers (Teaching Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom, 2004, etc.) may be just as radical in his politics as ever, in temperament, the years, fatherhood and a distinguished career as a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago seem to have mellowed him—a bit. “I’m genetically wired to speak up and speak out, and not always with considered judgment,” he admits. However, it’s not his outspokenness against militarism, racism, imperialism and other isms associated with the status quo that has drawn Ayers often unwittingly (not to say, unwillingly) into the national political spotlight. Oftentimes, fate has played a hand—on September 11, 2001, for example, when the New York Times by chance ran an article on Ayers’ then newly published memoirs of his radical past Fugitive Days under the title “No Regrets for a Love of Explosives.” The appearance of the article the morning the Twin Towers fell saddled Ayers in the minds of an influential portion of the media (both liberal and conservative) with the epithet “unrepentant terrorist” and made him too hot to handle for many bookstores, education conferences and college campuses. During his first presidential campaign, Barack Obama’s proximity to Ayers as a neighbor and occasional colleague was brutally, albeit ineffectively, cited by both Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin as evidence of the future president’s own alleged dangerous radicalism. Despite his notoriety earning him death threats, canceled invitations and the indignity of being denied the honorific “emeritus” by his university upon his retirement, the author is surprisingly bemused, and often charmingly amusing, about his predicament. His writing is thoughtful, penetratingly insightful and marvelously lacking in self-pity.
No matter how they feel about his politics, readers of this memoir should find the author’s humanity irresistible.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8070-3276-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
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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