Heartbreak at its most bittersweet.
An Irish singer/songwriter’s powerful debut memoir about growing up at the notorious Artane Industrial School for orphaned and abandoned boys in Dublin.
When Ellis began writing the lyrics for his 2009 album, “800 Voices,” he found himself unexpectedly overwhelmed by memories of his years at the Artane school for boys, an institution known for mistreating its unfortunate charges. He was just 8 years old when his alcoholic mother left him with the priests who ran Artane. She told her son she would take him home one day; instead, she left for England with a lover and never returned. In a story that alternates between his successful present and harrowing past, Ellis details how he survived the years of savagery at the hands of the school’s sadistic, whip-wielding priests to become a critically acclaimed musician. A combination of street-honed canniness and steadfast friendships with other boys saved him from the at-times bloody extremes of physical victimization. But it was the Artane Boys Band that saved his soul and gave him a place to express the anger, pain and confusion that roiled inside his “fighting Dublin heart.” A priest encouraged him to take up the trombone, an instrument on which Ellis was able to hone his gift for music. By the time he was 15, his skill and talent attracted the attention of a respected Irish musician who helped the young trombonist get work on the Irish show-band circuit after he left Artane. That Ellis uses the narrative to unearth a deliberately forgotten past makes for compelling reading. But what makes his work even more affecting is the way he uses his story to liberate the voices of otherwise forgotten children who endured “one of the most abusive and brutal institutions in Ireland.”
Heartbreak at its most bittersweet.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61145-892-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
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 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
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