A vivid book guaranteed to make readers more aware of what it takes to get that cellphone signal into his or her hand, for...
A memoir from a young “fourteen-dollar-an-hour cog in a thankless deadly wheel.”
For some people in this world, their routines involve drinking beer in lawn chairs set up in the parking lots of small-town hotels, then getting up to climb hundreds of feet into the air to construct and maintain the cellphone networks that the rest of us depend on. It’s dangerous work—the most dangerous job in the world, by the measure on which this narrative hinges, and one that has already taken the lives of many of the people portrayed here. In 1997, sometime screenwriter and playwright Delaney exchanged the ivory for the steel tower and made his first “tower dog” ascent into the sky over Kansas in freezing weather. “This would not be so bad,” he writes, instantly adding, “But for the next 200 feet and the next eleven hours it was very, very bad.” His fellow climbers are philosophical, if stoically resigned to the pain, discomfort, and danger of their work. They are also masterful technicians, and if nothing else, readers will learn what 4G means and how cellphone towers work. Throughout, the author plays a few writerly tricks, including protesting his writerly status (“I never called myself a writer. I never introduced myself as a writer and I was always uncomfortable when I was introduced as a writer”), but these are minor annoyances in a readable book whose larger import is in depicting a world that very few people would want to explore firsthand, somewhere between the blue-collar and the high-wire. Delaney is unfussy and workmanlike, and if he never attains the philosophical depth of, say, Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009), he delivers a persuasive, whole-sighted view of a highly specialized pursuit.
A vivid book guaranteed to make readers more aware of what it takes to get that cellphone signal into his or her hand, for better or worse.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61902-938-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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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