While brilliant enough on what it reveals, this tripartite memoir by a great man of letters nevertheless reserves much of his life from illumination. Kermode grew up between the world wars in Douglas, the chief port on the Isle of Man. Describing his Manx childhood, he expertly conveys the mixture of magic, mystery, and terror proper to literary recollections of one's youth. Memories of faking a report card, of enduring sadistic bullies, even of solemnly inquiring of God whether oranges taste the same to everyone might seem essentially commonplace. Yet Kermode's trenchant style transfigures such experiences, while his vivid depiction of straitlaced yet vibrant Manx culture as it slowly emerged from the Victorian era enhances his memoir's drama. Strong passages frame the enigma of his mother's vague rural origins and the niceties of class distinctions at the dockside warehouse where his father toiled. The next segment of the memoir treats Kermode's service in the British navy during WW II. Here he offers sterling anecdotes that convey the pathos, horror, and absurdities of the times. That the final third of the memoir, covering his 50-odd-year career as a scholar and literary journalist, should include only a few words about his two marriages disappoints. Kermode acknowledges this ellipsis, professing himself a failure as a family man. Such self-deprecation and reserve also characterize his account of his professional life, which Kermode narrates as a series of failures, most prominent among them his tenure at the CIA-supported literary magazine Encounter and a professorship at Cambridge University, both of which ended with him resigning in protest. More might have been said about his successful books and about his experiences teaching in the US. But what Kermode does share remains of great interest: However truncated, the story of his later years will intrigue literary intellectuals, while his lambent memoirs of youth should attract a broad audience.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-18103-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
