Bennahum’s debut is an autobiographical coming-of-age story, told eloquently through his relationship with computers. Bennahum, a contributing editor to Wired and Lingua Franca, digs through his memories of being an outsider throughout childhood, and details a fascination that began with his first Atari computer. The reflections are vivid and often provide cultural commentary on how the computer boom of the 1980s shaped a generation, and how kids— games like Space Invaders and Merlin broke the ground for today’s Internet age. Above all, Bennahum is an accomplished writer, both down-to-earth and inspiring, whether he’s describing the processes of a modem or the beguiling possibilities a child sees in an expansive white carpeted room. He consistently reaches into two of the most incomprehensible worlds (the mind of a computer and the mind of a little boy) and pulls out understandable and identifiable experiences. Bennahum is a storyteller for the kids who were born in the ’70s and grew up in the ’80s—the Atari generation. Adults nearing their 30s now who spent hours bootlegging software from BBSs, playing Pong and Breakout and comparing the merits of a Commodore 64 and a TRS-80 will find justification for and rejuvenation of their childhood fascination with those old boxy machines. Those who grew up alongside them will be rewarded with an insight into a cultural worldview that went largely unrecognized (and certainly unaccepted) because it belonged to kids, freethinkers, and crazy engineers. Just the sort of people Apple computers is applauding in their commercials today. In telling the story of the burgeoning computer culture, Bennahum winds up with a beautifully told story in which he comes to understand how his fascination with computers helped shape the way he thinks, the way he learns, and the way he copes. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1998
ISBN: 0-465-01235-3
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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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