by Helen Lewis ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1994
A compelling historical memoir by a Czech Jew who survived Auschwitz. Before WW II Lewis studied at the Milca Mayerova dance school in Prague and performed with its professional company. She also taught dance and choreographed her own pieces. After the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, Lewis and her husband were deported to the ``model camp'' of Theresienstadt; later they were transported to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, where they lost track of each other. Lewis, who was a member of a transport of prisoners sent from Auschwitz to labor camps at Stutthof and Kochstadt, survived the war; her husband did not. In 1947 she remarried and settled in Belfast, where she became involved again in choreographing and teaching dance. Lewis writes about the mistreatment she endured in the camps in a straightforward, understated way. She describes small but extraordinary acts of bravery and resistance, such as the time starving prisoners at Kochstadt voted to fast on Yom Kippur despite Nazi threats to withhold their rations once the fast was over. She also describes acts of kindness from unlikely individuals that saved her life; one SS guard slipped her a bottle of medicine for dysentery, thus saving her from selection for death. Through it all, she refused to give up hope and continued to see beauty in the ugliest of surroundings. Lewis's intelligence shines throughout, made more luminous by her compassionate observations about the effects of war on human beings.
Pub Date: May 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-7867-0068-8
Page Count: 144
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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