“Perhaps the fact that I chased so many dreams explains why I ultimately fell from grace.” No, McNall fell from grace—if...
A grim tale of the glamorous life and the fraud that kept it aloft until all came tumbling down, told with an annoying measure of self-serving drivel by wheeler-dealer and ex-jailbird McNall.
Thanks most likely to the hand of Pulitzer-winner D’Antonio (Tour ’72, 2002, etc.), McNall’s story has a polished momentum. Its subject, however, is deeply unappealing: a striver who broke the law to satisfy an urge to sit at the high table of Los Angeles fame. McNall started as a rare coin-dealer, one for whom making money took a back seat to the historical romance of drachmas, and it’s easy to admire his passion for the work. But soon that passion gave way to the greater pleasure of rubbing shoulders with the Hollywood bigwigs who bought his goods. While McNall bemoans their motives—they were interested in coins for the profit, not the poetry—he started to emulate them, buying into movies and thoroughbreds in hopes of big killings, and entering the world of moneyed celebrity rather than the artistry. By the time he purchased a piece of the L.A. Kings hockey team, he was in desperate need of cash to finance various losing investments. So he resorted to false invoicing, false purchase documents, false appraisals—fraud—for which he now serves up such comments as, “I know those kind of dealings might sound shocking. Some of them were illegal. But in the world I inhabited, those kind of favors were as commonplace as baksheesh in Cairo.” He cringed at “the awful, humiliating prospect of failure. I had become a public figure.” Poor baby. By this point, McNall is shedding interested and sympathetic readers like rain off a slicker.
“Perhaps the fact that I chased so many dreams explains why I ultimately fell from grace.” No, McNall fell from grace—if there was any—because he was a crook who got caught. (8 pp. b&w photo insert, not seen)Pub Date: July 9, 2003
ISBN: 0-7868-6864-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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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