The first biography of one of American poetry's finest lyricists—whose literary grace and authority, musical sense, and headlong (often foolish) way with life bears remarkable resemblance to the much differently circumstanced Boris Pasternak's. Gooch (Scary Kisses, 1988) follows O'Hara from his Massachusetts Catholic boyhood (son of an alcoholic mother who'd be a cafard to O'Hara all his life) to Harvard (where he was part of the remarkable postwar literary generation that included Creeley, Brodkey, Donald Hall, Ashbery, Koch, Edward Gorey, and more) and then to New York. There, O'Hara not only was (with Ashbery and Koch) the coagulator of the New York School style of poetry, but his art criticism became seminal to the first- and second-generation Abstract Expressionist painters and sculptors of the 50's, a position that elided with ever higher curatorial positions he held at the MOMA until his tragic death at 40, hit by a dune buggy on Fire Island in the dead of night. O'Hara's friendships—homo- and heterosexual—were the very weft of his life: Around him much of the best of midcentury New York art revolved, played, feuded, splintered. Gooch misses none of these social complications, but no scale seems to have weighed the testimonies relatively, and this gives the book a passive and flattened feel: Interviewees come off as talking-head opinion- spouters, all—and none—equally to the point. The paucity of literary appreciation here, of critical eye, is the real disappointment. O'Hara's remarkable poetry is quoted, dated, summarized—but never quite appreciated for its unusual achievements. Literary queen bee—that's what O'Hara comes off as here (which, granted, at his worst he sometimes took himself to be only as well), not the prince of poetry he would more enduringly become. (Fifty-five photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: June 8, 1993
ISBN: 0-394-57118-5
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993
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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