Eminently readable and largely remarkable.
Karmi’s debut, a matter-of-fact memoir focusing on his ordeals in Nazi concentration camps, strikes a relatively upbeat chord largely discordant with works by other Holocaust survivors.
Born into a Jewish family in the then-Hungarian city of Satu Mare, a young Karmi grows up in a country that is increasingly hostile to its Jewish population. With Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, the hostility becomes a matter of official policy; despite his valiant service to Austria-Hungary in World War I, David’s father’s foreign heritage results in the family’s expulsion to Poland. There, the Karmis attempt to bunk with unhelpful relations, then undertake great risks to return to Satu Mare, only to find their home and possessions seized. Soon the family is deported once again, this time to Auschwitz, where young David is separated from his parents and sister amid horrific rumors of their likely fate. David survives not only Auschwitz, but a transfer to a second camp in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto and then a death march to Dachau in Germany as the Allied armies close in. The author ascribes his improbable endurance to the fact that he never gave up hope—he writes in an afterword, “I always look forward to tomorrow and try to forget yesterday”—and indeed, the book lacks the tonal despair employed by fellow survivors such as Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, instead echoing the optimism of Anne Frank’s pre-camp diaries. But perhaps just as important to David’s survival as his sunny outlook are his quick wits, good fortune and knack for making the right kinds of friends—ranging from fellow inmates who share his pluck to a sympathetic Wehrmacht lieutenant who even invites David out of the camp to his family’s home for meals. Though Karmi’s narrative loses steam once he details his post-war emigration to Palestine, his prose moves along at a respectable clip and rarely lingers on trivial details, until a handful of later chapters profiling Karmi’s successful but relatively dull American real-estate career.
Eminently readable and largely remarkable.Pub Date: July 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615412955
Page Count: 280
Publisher: D.K. Montague
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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