Insightful, generous, and perfectly pitched: a good nonfiction companion to Before Women Had Wings (1996), Fowler’s novel...
From popular novelist Fowler (Remembering Blue, 2000, etc.), a searing and finely crafted memoir of youth and adulthood stunted by abuse.
The author’s great achievement is to demonstrate convincingly how intelligent and accomplished women can become trapped in destructive situations that seem inescapable. In her case, Fowler admits, a tender heart as well as emotional vulnerabilities made her susceptible to abuse. She loved her parents, who had endured tough times and been beaten as children themselves: how could she blame her father for drinking too much and beating her mother? Then, when he suddenly died, Mama “with not a clue how to manage . . . plunged deeper into the family tradition: mean bitterness fueled by alcohol.” Teased unmercifully about her buckteeth, Connie was sure she was ugly and an easy mark for the abusive man who later told her she was stupid as well. She begins her story with that unnamed man, an aging, alcoholic former newscaster she’s living with in Tampa, Florida, in 1984. He’s promised to help the 26-year-old college graduate become a writer, but in truth he himself is washed up professionally. Their relationship is platonic—he claims to have testicular cancer—but he frequently goes off with other women; she pays his bills, cooks and cleans, and endures his brutal physical attacks. She acquires a dog, Katie, whose love is an abiding comfort, begins a promising writing job on a local magazine, and falls in love with coworker Mika Fowler, an unhappily married photographer. But, even when her abuser steals the money she’d saved to fix her teeth, it takes a while before she has the courage and conviction to leave.
Insightful, generous, and perfectly pitched: a good nonfiction companion to Before Women Had Wings (1996), Fowler’s novel covering similar territory.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-50201-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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