The latest gem in the publisher’s already glittering Eminent Lives series.
Brief but illuminating biography of the troubled and troubling French poet.
Jean Nicholas Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91) composed revolutionary verse, carried on a wild, sometimes violent love affair with fellow poet Paul Verlaine, then abandoned his muse and pursued lucre in Africa. Prolific novelist/memoirist/biographer White (Hotel de Dream, 2007, etc.) offers a lucid, literate introduction to the poet’s short but turbulent life. He begins with a personal connection, recalling his elation when, as a troubled gay adolescent, he discovered Rimbaud’s verse and homosexuality. White moves swiftly through his subject’s spectacular early student career, up-and-down relationship with his mother (to whose home he continually returned, even in his most frenetic phases), voracious reading, early experiments with verse, lifelong wanderlust and ill-fated relationship with Verlaine. It was 16-year-old Rimbaud who made contact; Verlaine, a far more celebrated poet at the time, recognized the boy’s talent and invited him to Paris. Before their affair was over, the older man had left his wife, destroyed his reputation and spent two years in jail for shooting Rimbaud through the wrist. Nonetheless, White shows, Verlaine remained his tormentor’s strongest supporter. No one really knows for certain why Rimbaud abandoned literature and intransigently refused to return to it, preferring to labor in a rock quarry, run guns or trade ivory. White speculates that he was driven by greed and perhaps a desire to start fresh far away from Paris and London, where his reputation had been sullied by his sexual escapades, among other things. Unsurprisingly, the author offers insightful commentary on Rimbaud’s verse as well.
The latest gem in the publisher’s already glittering Eminent Lives series.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-934633-15-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Atlas & Co.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
IN THE NEWS
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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