More likely to make readers petition for a continental name change than sing Vespucci’s praises.
Far from being the innovative navigational genius of legend, Vespucci emerges here as salesman extraordinaire.
Although Fernández-Armesto (History/Tufts; Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration, 2006, etc.) gallantly attempts to make him appear otherwise, Amerigo Vespucci is the historical equivalent of a great trailer for a lame movie. In summation, he’s an undeniably compelling figure, as evidenced by the book’s opening salvo: “Amerigo Vespucci…was a pimp in his youth and a magus in his maturity.” It’s hard not to be intrigued by a man who was on intimate terms with both Columbus and the Medici family, a man who enjoyed an almost mystical reputation as a navigator. Readers will quickly find, however, that broad descriptions of his exploits are far more compelling than the actual events of his life. Vespucci is a shadowy figure; he left behind little original writing, and a number of works attributed to him are of dubious authenticity. He was also a mercenary hack who sold his services to the highest bidder—though, to be fair, this was no egregious offense at the time. Unlike Columbus, from whom he drew heavily in his descriptions of his voyages and the lands he encountered, Vespucci was a passive traveler, not the commander of an expedition. He claimed expertise with a variety of instruments, but in actuality the showy, authoritative manner he employed when flourishing them in front of bewildered seamen was inversely proportional to his ability to use them correctly. The mapmaker who named South America in Vespucci’s honor later regretted that decision and sought to rechristen it “Terra Incognita”; by then, however, historical inertia had taken hold.
More likely to make readers petition for a continental name change than sing Vespucci’s praises.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6281-2
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
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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