A worthwhile biography of an unsung heroine of World War II, but its subject remains elusive.
Mulley (The Woman Who Saved the Children: A Biography of Eglantyne Jebb, 2010) delivers a biography of the first woman to serve as a field operative for British intelligence during World War II.
The author examines the life of Christine Granville (1908–1952), daughter of a marriage of convenience between a Polish nobleman and a Jewish heiress. A free spirit from birth, the loss of her family’s fortune and Poland’s freedom propelled her into a life of adventure and danger throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Gifted with a magnetic personality that gave her power over men (and dogs), Granville provided valuable intelligence to the Allies and, late in the war, support to the French Resistance, despite seemingly having to fight her superiors at every step to be given the chance to serve. In addition to the difficulty of unraveling the secrets of spies and the passing with time of most of the primary sources, the author faces a major problem in the near-total absence of the voice of her subject, who famously hated to write letters and was known to embellish her war stories. What Mulley lacks in access to Granville’s inner thoughts, she tries to make up for with meticulous research, though the level of detail occasionally slows the narrative momentum. Even after Granville began her service, much of her time was spent dealing with political infighting between various intelligence factions. Beginning with her assistance to France in 1944, Granville accomplished extraordinary feats, including freeing several of her colleagues from captivity on the eve of their scheduled executions. Following the war, Granville struggled to adapt in the face of what many Poles felt was the betrayal of their country by its supposed ally, Britain, and her abandonment by the postwar government. On June 15, 1952, she was stabbed to death by a rejected suitor.
A worthwhile biography of an unsung heroine of World War II, but its subject remains elusive.Pub Date: June 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-03032-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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 autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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