A punctilious and perceptive biography of Arthur Koestler, whose 1940 novel Darkness At Noon became part of the intellectual arsenal that eventually brought down the Berlin Wall. Koestler, claims Cesarani (History/Southampton Univ.), was a brilliant journalist and “an outstanding chronicler of his times.” He wrote novels, two volumes of autobiography, and countless essays. A man of the left and a member of the between-the-wars “pink” generation, he criticized the USSR and communism at a time when both were immensely popular and powerful, especially among the intelligentsia. Friendly with Sartre, Orwell, and Camus, he was also the quintessential Wandering Jew whose only real home was his mind. Though charming and kind, Koestler often quarreled with his friends and treated women abominably: He raped the wife of a good friend, was unfaithful to his own three spouses, and, Cesarani suggests, persuaded his much younger third wife to commit suicide with him in 1983 even though her health, unlike his, was good. Born in 1905 in Hungary, Koestler lived through a better childhood than his autobiography claimed, but his uncomfortable family, together with the dislocations of war and revolution, explained much of his subsequent behavior as well as his search for a permanent home. Attracted first to Zionism, he began his journalistic career in Palestine in the 1920s, then moved on to communism until his experiences in the USSR and the Spanish War changed his mind, and finally embraced parascience. Dealing with Koestler’s background, his writing, and his compulsive traveling, home-buying, and womanizing, Cesarani concludes that the writer’s “relationship with his Jewishness is fundamental to understanding the man and his work, and, by extension, the condition of post-modernity.” Both a splendid biography of one of the century’s great minds and a vivid history of the period, especially the years when revolution was in the air and totalitarianism on the rise.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-86720-6
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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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