Yaffe honors her hero throughout: a smart reader and a shrewd but sympathetic judge of character who knows that...
A witty expedition into the wilds of Austen City Limits, where there’s no such thing as being too obsessed with the author of Pride and Prejudice.
Although barely known in her lifetime, the works of Jane Austen (1775–1817) were so popular within a century of her death that the term “Janeite” was coined to describe a devoted fan. Yaffe (Other People's Children: The Battle for Justice and Equality in New Jersey's Schools, 2007) explores the dimensions of modern Jane-o-mania, her own included. There’s the Jane Austen Society of North America, whose members (Yaffe among them) spend months acquiring just the right Regency gown for the annual gala. There are regular visitors to the Republic of Pemberley website who argue the finer points of Mansfield Park well into the wee hours. We meet Cisco Systems co-founder Sandy Lerner, who spent $20 million of her buyout money on the purchase and renovation of Austen’s Chawton House in England. We also meet readers who simply love the stories, fan-fiction writers (some quite successful) who indulge them, and serious academics who loathe both. On the other extreme are people who read too much between the lines, like the full-time explicator who sees every Austen novel as a labyrinth of subtle clues, disclosing a “shadow story” of family abuse beneath the surface romance. Others similarly create Austen in their own image: A nurse practitioner sees “borderline personality disorder” in the female characters; a speech pathologist thinks Mr. Darcy has mild autism. For Yaffe and others, there’s a constant tug of war between sharing Jane with the world and keeping her for one’s self.
Yaffe honors her hero throughout: a smart reader and a shrewd but sympathetic judge of character who knows that Austenophilia has its own laws of attraction.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-547-75773-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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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