Will have strong appeal for soccer fans and observers of celebrity culture, though such readers may not enjoy the questions...
Unusual and affecting reflection on the toxic combination of achievement, addiction and celebrity culture, as embodied by the decline of one-time soccer champion George Best (1946–2005).
In 2003, as a neophyte reporter, Daily Telegraph feature writer Walden (Harm’s Way, 2008) received an unusual assignment: to “babysit” Best on behalf of their mutual employer, the newspaper that published Best’s ghostwritten column. Sometimes referred to as the “Fifth Beatle” for his youthful charisma in his prime, Best’s fortunes had suffered due to a severe alcohol dependency and a failed marriage that played out in the tabloids. After tracking Best down in Malta, Walden and her subject developed a strange friendship, with Walden playing a combination of minder and earnest conscience, as Best’s marriage faltered and he attempted to quit drinking at an expensive spa, only to give in further to it. Walden observes that Best “felt for alcohol what the glutton feels for food: it hijacked every one of his senses.” The author portrays the milieu of British celebrity journalism as fueled by mindless competitive aggression, upon which Best provides wry commentary. The grim narrative spectacle of his decline is leavened by the pair’s irreverent exchanges (Best appreciated her tart honesty) and Walden’s prose, which is often observant and strikingly original. Despite his frequently boorish behavior, including hitting his wife (the offense that finally cost him the newspaper column and its much-needed income), Walden captures Best in sympathetic, nuanced fashion. He was a bright, charismatic sportsman whose early achievements led to a confused life of excess, always in the public eye.
Will have strong appeal for soccer fans and observers of celebrity culture, though such readers may not enjoy the questions Walden’s tale implicitly raises.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60819-942-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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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