Like sheep themselves, the author’s account often wanders outside the confines of the pasture and into the readers’ hearts.
What is the common thread between road rage, Elvis and socks?
The answer: wool, writes Friend (The Compassionate Carnivore, 2009, etc.) in this memoir about raising sheep with her partner. The story begins with an anecdote about a man who, during a visit to the author’s farm to purchase beef, became riveted by a sign that read, “Warning Electric Fence.” It's the perfect extended metaphor for Friend’s adventures on the farm—that caution often gives way to curiosity, demonstrated soon after as the man reached out and was shocked. Like her customer, the author has been intrigued by adventures into unknown territory. In her latest installment of life on the farm, the author focuses on the middles, the times not often celebrated, ruminating on being both mid-career and middle-aged. The author's humility is engaging, and she is well aware that sheep farming isn't the broadest of interests: “If people are relying on me to show them the way, they’re in big trouble…basically because I’ve begun turning to memoirs myself in search of direction and encouragement.” But she's quite wise, as well, offering several insights into what humans can learn from sheep. Friend ably weaves together comical stories, strands of self-help, historical and environmental facts.
Like sheep themselves, the author’s account often wanders outside the confines of the pasture and into the readers’ hearts.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-306-81844-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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