Some somber new brushstrokes darken an already dismal painting. (37 b&w illustrations)
Another examination of the passion, poetry, infidelity, depression, ambition, lies, and suffering that have made Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath the most notorious couple in modern literary history.
Middlebrook (Anne Sexton, 1991, etc.) did much research for this latest brick in the now-imposing edifice of material about Plath and Hughes. She examined the Hughes papers, now available to scholars at Emory University, as well as the Plath archive at Smith College. She refers early and often, as well, to Hughes’s two 1998 volumes dealing with Plath, Birthday Letters and the lesser-known Howls and Whispers, which appeared in an edition of 110 copies. Middlebrook endeavors to withhold judgment about Hughes’s behavior with Plath and her successors, but his actions as a serial adulterer speak quite eloquently. As does his poetry, from which the author quotes liberally. She speculates about the “disappearance” of some key Plath material, about the contents of a trunk at Emory that cannot be opened until 2023, and about the causes of Plath’s 1963 suicide. Her conclusion about the latter? Depression—hardly a novel insight. Middlebrook begins with the 1956 meeting of her two principals and then moves steadily forward to Hughes’s 1998 death from heart failure and cancer, though some chapters loop to revisit and modify earlier segments. The author makes insightful comments about each poet’s writing, about their individual artistic growth, and about their collaborations: before their break-up, in their impecunious days, they regularly read each other’s work and even composed at the same table. Middlebrook sensitively shows how each helped fashion the other, though some of her psychological observations sound a bit loopy, e.g., he is a “poet-shaman, journeying in the psychological murk of fear and detestation of the female.”
Some somber new brushstrokes darken an already dismal painting. (37 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03187-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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