Surprisingly readable, despite the author’s abundant disgust for himself and others.
Driven by a series of demons he’s eager to detail, debut memoirist Itzkoff lays bare the torments of his young, post-collegiate life as an aspiring editor in the testosterone-scented offices of men’s magazine publishers.
With his seething resentment, sexual desperation, and near-crippling insecurity, the author bears more than a passing resemblance to Philip Roth’s Portnoy. This time, however, our narrator’s Jewish mother is basically off the hook; it’s Dad who is the ultimate source of their son’s sufferings. Itzkoff bookends his coming-of-age tale with portraits of his father, a furrier who drowned disappointments in cocaine. When the story opens after Dave’s graduation from Princeton in 1998, Dad has retired to the New Jersey suburbs to drift around the house in his underwear; at its close, he has nearly died of a drug overdose. Meanwhile, his son, determined not to be this kind of man, is bouncing around the Manhattan offices of men’s magazines, first at Details, then Maxim. Working for these publications is less fulfilling that Itzkoff had imagined, however; full of loathing for himself and everyone around him, the author portrays his professional milieu as a waking nightmare of puerile torment and emotional distance. Offering plenty of dirt for those interested in four-year-old magazine gossip, the author isn’t shy about describing the debauchery and flawed human relations that were the rule in his places of employ. In fact, he isn’t shy about describing anything, including his difficulties with relationships, his various bouts of drug use, and the very specific details of an unpleasant session with a prostitute. At every possible moment, Itzkoff shoehorns in self-deprecating Jewish slurs, mentioning his high-school nose job at least twice. Taken as a whole, however, the author’s tale has a not-unappealing nervous energy, and his jumpy, edgy prose will probably keep readers turning the pages.
Surprisingly readable, despite the author’s abundant disgust for himself and others.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6113-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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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