Offutt follows up his collection of agrarian short stories (Kentucky Straight, 1992—not reviewed) with a picaresque tale of a decade on the road. The author is the protagonist in this engaging and irreverent story, much of which may even be factual. But even if some of the details may not be literally true, as a cynical reader might suspect, the book is sometimes truly literate. Offutt, almost as enamored with Figures of Speech as he is with Mother Nature, devises some similes (``a city as cold as crowbar''; ``predictable as diarrhea'') that are more adroit than others (``The sky was a gray flannel blanket like a water color background with too much paint''). The author sprang from the foothills of Appalachia (where the terrain is ``humped like a kicked rug'') before he turned 20. Before he was 30, not so long ago, he passed through New York and Minnesota, California and the Everglades, the plains, mountains, and swamps of America. Drifting his way past redoubts of poverty and outposts of counterculture, Offutt sought his fortune, perhaps as an actor, perchance as a playwright or maybe as a poet. What he found, besides sex, was occasional work as a dishwasher, a mosquito-plagued naturalist, and a faux walrus in a surreal, flea- bitten circus. (A job promotion's upward mobility: He was allowed to sleep under the truck.) The effect is Candide following the path of Orwell down and out in Paris and London. Threaded throughout is the moving journal of Offutt's wife's pregnancy and the birth of the Offutt scion. Finally, Offutt tends his own garden beside a river in America's heartland as he offers an acute reconstruction of things that may have passed. As the old adage has it, you can't step into the same river twice. Even so, a dip into this stream of self-consciousness is an entertaining pastime.
Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-78734-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
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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