A lively and refreshing memoir.
A politically liberal radio and TV host reflects on his unconventional career path.
Born in 1940, Press (Buyer's Remorse: How Obama Let Progressives Down, 2016, etc.) grew up a strict Catholic in Delaware City. He has happy memories of his childhood and adolescence, but with the benefit of hindsight inflected by progressivism, he observes that life in his hometown was good “as long as you were white.” His first encounter with politics came through his grandfather and father, both of whom served as mayor of their town. Knowing he also wanted a career in public service, Press decided on the priesthood. But after almost a decade studying theology in the U.S. and Europe, he chose to become a “worker priest” rather than a teacher and left for California in 1967. After a few years “protesting the war in Vietnam, counseling runaways in the Haight-Ashbury…and working for Gene McCarthy,” he went to Sacramento to begin his career as a staffer for Democratic state senator Peter Behr. Press then spent the next decade as an environmental activist and then as a key player in Jerry Brown’s 1976 presidential campaign. By 1980, the author had turned his attention to media work, which led to TV and radio jobs at stations in Los Angeles and, later, to the position—as the liberal co-host of CNN’s Crossfire—that brought him to national attention. Throughout the book, the author tends toward frequent name-dropping while expressing an unapologetically leftist perspective that often critiques the current presidential administration. Yet at the same time, he speaks with respect and affection of many of his right-leaning colleagues such as Pat Buchanan, Tucker Carlson, and John McCain. In an age where the debate between left and right has become “ugly and personal” and blighted by negativity, his ability to remain optimistic about politics and disagree with the opposition in a civil manner is a welcome relief.
A lively and refreshing memoir.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-14715-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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