A third-rate biography of a second-rate talent. Even a fading camp icon like Midler deserves better than Mair's (Oprah Winfrey, 1994, not reviewed, etc.) breathless yet strangely feeble account. Despite its subtitle, this book, which has all the intimacy of a handshake, seems more of a testament to the NEXIS database than anything approaching original authorial research. Mair manages the remarkable feat of simultaneously telling us both more and less than we ever wanted to know as he traces Midler's rise from a lonely Jewish girl growing up in Hawaii to her mild accomplishments as chanteuse, actress, and occasional author. Every wonderful and fabulous and sensational twitch of an achievement by Midler is catalogued, with just a grudging iota of elbow room set aside for her less than wonderful, fabulous, and sensational moments. So she has a reputation for being incredibly difficult to work with? Tra-la-la. So she fired her entire musical troupe after a concert tour? Tiddley pom. Mair makes few attempts to understand Midler, to subject her and her talents to the kind of considered critical or psychological analysis usually found in biographies. In fact, Mair seems perfectly content to luxuriate in the reflected glow of his subject's general stupendousness. As he writes, ``We love her because she is us and we are her.'' Almost in spite of himself, Mair occasionally stumbles across something interesting. His brief analysis of the difficulties older actresses have finding roles (women over 40 get only 9 percent of all roles) borders on the trenchant. He also manages a reasonable understanding of Midler's resonant appeal to gay audiences. Not so much a tell-all biography as a fawning and amateurish show-and-tell. (24 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55972-272-X
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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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