An intelligent voice that spoke with grace, honesty, and humor.
Brief essays exploring universal themes—friendship, loneliness, and love—and observations on contemporary life, from Barbie dolls and Linda Tripp to computer solitaire.
These columns by the late Knapp, who wrote for Boston Phoenix, and other publications, span her career from the ’80s until her death in 2002, at age 42. Here, they’re grouped by theme into five parts: “Without,” on grief, loss, and sobriety; “With,” on friendship, family, and love; “Out There,” on the state of the world; “In Here,” on her inner world; and “The Merry Recluse,” on solitude, shyness, and loneliness. The title is taken from a piece on being single that Knapp wrote for Slate in 1998, but little merriment appears in the opening pieces. In these she deals with the deaths of her parents and her recovery from anorexia and alcoholism, subjects she explored in greater depth in Appetites (2003) and Drinking (1996). Knapp’s wit emerges in part two when she writes about her dog, Lucille, and engages in a debate with columnist Ron Rosenbaum on the relative value of dogs and cats. It blossoms in parts three and four, where she offers tart and original ideas on how corporate America could improve employee morale (e.g., on-site laundries) and how science could lighten the lot of females (e.g., the five-minute menstrual cycle), invents some new gods for the ’90s (e.g., Testicles—rhymes with Hercules—the god of male chauvinist pigs), and expands the concept of nicotine-patch technology to other human needs (e.g., a healing chicken-soup patch). Most memorable, however, are her forthright, unsentimental examinations of her life as a woman living alone and working alone that beautifully elucidate the pleasures of solitude and the pain of isolation.
An intelligent voice that spoke with grace, honesty, and humor.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58243-313-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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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