A memoir that offers a rare, underrepresented perspective on World War II.
Maroscher (Short Stories: German 1.1 Reader, 2011, etc.) recounts the challenges of being a young boy in Europe during World War II and growing up in America in its aftermath.
The author’s parents met in Romania and wed in 1939, the same year that Germany invaded Poland, igniting World War II. He was born in 1943, after his brother, Gunter. His father—a Lutheran minister, schoolteacher, and “reluctant warrior”—was called to join the Hungarian army to fight the encroaching Russian forces. The Russians’ reputation for brutality was well- known, so Maroscher’s mother decided to flee with her two boys before traveling to her sister’s house in Weimar, Germany. She took them aboard a train that was evacuating wounded German soldiers, and she braved numerous hardships, including the constant threat of air raids. They stopped in Herzogenburg, Austria, and lived at a refugee camp, formerly a monastery. The conditions were cramped and deplorable, and food was so scarce the author’s mother had to threaten the director with a gun to have access to it; her boys were all but starving. They finally made it to Weimar and lived under American occupation when the war ended, which was relatively tolerable, despite the family’s reasonable suspicions of the conquering force. Things took a turn for the worse, though, when the Americans were replaced by Russians. Maroscher’s father had been gone for two years by that point, and his mother secretly sent a note to their old home, hoping to discover whether he was alive. The family was eventually reunited and, in the face of economic hardship, immigrated to the United States. Over the years, the family gradually realized the American dream, improving their lot and achieving impressive social mobility. Maroscher’s research, while reliant upon informal interviews with family members, is impressively meticulous and thorough. The author controls the narrative like an orchestra conductor, allowing each player’s contribution to have its part within the piece as a whole. Also, he’s refreshingly candid about his own life, particularly his sometimes-troubled teenage years, and he writes with wit and compassion. The memoir’s length and detail may be challenging for readers who aren’t familiar with the Maroscher family, but students of history will be engaged by this unusual story of World War II survivors.
A memoir that offers a rare, underrepresented perspective on World War II.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9816079-6-2
Page Count: 361
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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