Queer history and Holocaust history converge in this remarkable account.
A “passionate friendship” shared by two women imprisoned in a concentration camp.
Grete Buber-Neumann, a German communist, was sent to Ravensbrück, the concentration camp for women, in 1940. Milena Jesenská, from a wealthy family in Prague, arrived two months later. The camp's inmates were organized in a caste system, with so-called “asocials”—prostitutes, lesbians, Roma—at the bottom. But as relatively privileged prisoners—Grete a “block elder,” Milena an office secretary—both had a “clear view of the sinister Nazi machinations” afoot. Strauss knows that her subjects would not have identified as lesbians, but their loving relationship was nonetheless instrumental in “defeating the unbearable reality” of a wretched life in a slave-labor turned death camp. Their lives are well explored. Milena, a political journalist who played an important part in the Czech resistance to Nazi occupation, was an intimate of and correspondent with Franz Kafka and is now acknowledged as his first translator. Grete, a survivor of the Soviet gulag, wrote the postwar memoir Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler (1948), “compelled by her promise to Milena to ‘bear witness to the tragedy of my generation.’” Milena died at Ravensbrück in 1944; Greta was released in 1945 and died in 1989. All of the camp's records were burned up before its liberation by the Red Army, so the lives of these two brave women have been all but “erased from history.” But Strauss’ research into and reimagining of their four years together amount to an essential rediscovery of this history. Her work is as alert to the tenderness of their connection as to the immense evil of their surroundings.
Queer history and Holocaust history converge in this remarkable account.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2025
ISBN: 9781250285744
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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