A superbly nuanced portrait of a tortured character.
A lucid portrait of the enigmatic French writer and mystic.
With this volume, Gray (At Home with the Marquis de Sade, 1998, etc.) adds to the considerable success already achieved by the Penguin series of brief biographies. Weil makes for a challenging subject: Her writing is relatively unknown in the US, and in many respects her life was her most ambitious work. Born into a prosperous Jewish family in 1909, she eventually found fulfillment through a combination of extreme asceticism, solidarity with the working class, and Catholicism. At 16 she wrote, “Sacrifice is the acceptance of pain, the refusal to obey the animal in oneself, and the will to redeem suffering men through voluntary suffering.” And suffer she did: lifelong migraines, anorexia, and a tendency—perhaps subconscious—towards self-mutilation. As Gray observes, for Weil “the cult of self-mastery could all too readily become self-destructive.” Despite her cultivation of personal misery, Weil achieved a great deal. A brilliant student, she went on to considerable success as a schoolteacher, and offered free courses to working people in her spare time. She also spent a year working in various factories, where she attempted (with increasing disillusionment) to help the workers organize. Despite her sympathies with the working class (and her service with the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War), Weil was an early critic of Stalin and the Communist Party. Her position reflected a deep suspicion of power: A keen student of Machiavelli and Hobbes, she realized that those in power, whatever their professed beliefs, quickly become concerned primarily with self-perpetuation at the cost of social advancement. Towards the end of her brief life (she died at 34), Weil became deeply attached to Catholic doctrine, but she was reluctant to identify herself with any religion and deliberately chose not to be baptized. Many of her most important essays date from her final years and concern her search (never fully realized) for redemption.
A superbly nuanced portrait of a tortured character.Pub Date: June 25, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89998-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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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