Warm, shrewd and glowing with love for her son, these letters offer an indelible portrait of an extraordinary woman and her...
A mother’s letters to her son illuminate British history.
The beautiful socialite Diana Cooper (1892-1986), wife of statesman Duff Cooper, was separated from her only son, John Julius Norwich (b. 1929), for many years from 1939 to 1952. As war approached, the couple sent him to America for his safety. When he returned, he enrolled at Eton; at 18, he joined the Royal Navy. Missing him deeply, Lady Diana wrote hundreds of letters from which Norwich (Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy, 2011, etc.) has selected those he considers “the best” in revealing his witty mother and her elite circle. A “Directory of Names” identifies informal, even chummy references to such notables as Duckling (Winston Churchill), Bill (William S. Paley, president of CBS, with whose family Norwich lived in New York during the war), Bloggs (Wyndham Baldwin, the son of the prime minister, with whom, Norwich writes, “my mother had a gentle love affair”) and Mr. Wu (Evelyn Waugh). Norwich introduces each of the sections with a sample letter to his parents and a lively biographical précis, setting his mother’s correspondence in context. Her own letters are charming, anecdotal and sharply observant, meant both to share her experiences and draw her son close: “I enclose my broadcast,” she wrote when he was 11, “not that I’m in any way proud of it but… so that we may not lose touch with one another. It’s so easy with the waste of seas between us.” Lady Diana, having no pretense of self-importance, was not easily impressed. Queen Elizabeth seemed to her a “plump little siren,” and Churchill, amusing but self-indulgent. She makes palpable the assault of the Blitz, England’s desperate need for American support and the dire conditions of postwar Europe, as well as her husband’s frustrating tenure as minister of information.
Warm, shrewd and glowing with love for her son, these letters offer an indelible portrait of an extraordinary woman and her vanished world.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4683-0922-5
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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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