A compelling account of crushing oppression, those who sought to flee it, and those who, at great risk, offered help.
The potent story of a Jewish woman who fled, hid, endured imprisonment and debasement, and eventually escaped to Switzerland in June 1943.
In a republished volume that has enduring relevance, Frenkel (1889-1975), who originally produced her long-forgotten and recently rediscovered work in 1945 (original title: No Place To Lay One’s Head), chronicles her life before and after the Nazis rose in Germany and invaded France. As the new title suggests, she was a bookshop owner. She tells about her early love for books and her decision to go into the business—and to locate that business in Berlin, where she found no shops specializing in French literature (her love). When the Nazi oppressions grew more severe in Germany, she returned to France, where conditions were tolerable—at least for a while. Then she was forced to hide with sympathetic gentile friends, but she soon realized France was no longer safe, so she resolved to escape to Switzerland. She was apprehended in the process and spent time in custody before, miraculously, a judge freed her after a brief trial. A bit later, she made a second attempt to cross the border and succeeded despite gunfire and a near recapture. Frenkel, who originally wrote the book not long after her escape, is a fine writer: detailed, emotional, and careful about giving her readers sufficient information to keep the tension taut and not overwhelm. The current edition features some useful additions, including a chronology and a “dossier,” a compilation of some research to validate what the author wrote, as well as a preface by French novelist and Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano. Pictures, photocopies, and translations of documents comprise nearly 30 pages of engaging and relevant backmatter.
A compelling account of crushing oppression, those who sought to flee it, and those who, at great risk, offered help.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-50-119984-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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